Thomas Hardy was a renowned English novelist and poet born in 1840 in Dorset, England. He received some formal education as a child and later trained as an architect, though he went on to have a successful career as a writer. Some of his most famous novels include Far From the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Hardy focused on ordinary people living in rural England and often depicted humans as subject to fate and external forces beyond their control. He wrote in the Victorian era and is considered one of the great English authors of that time period.