John Galsworthy won a Nobel Prize in literature in 1932. He is best known for writing the Forsyte Saga. Galsworthy campaigned for various social causes in his writing, including prison reform, censorship issues, women's rights, and the rights of animals. The Patrician begins in a large dining hall filled with the historical relics collected by a family over the centuries. "For in this dining hall--one of the finest in England--the Caradoc family had for centuries assembled the trophies and records of their existence. Round about this dining hall they had built and pulled down and restored, until the rest of Monkland Court presented some aspect of homogeneity. Here alone they had left virgin the work of the old quasi-monastic builders, and within it unconsciously deposited their souls. For there were here, meeting the eyes of light, all those rather touching evidences of man's desire to persist for ever, those shells of his former bodies, the fetishes and queer proofs of his faiths, together with the remorseless demonstration of their treatment at the hands of Time."