Geoffrey Chaucer – Author Biography
Geoffrey Chaucer was the father of English literature — the fourteenth-century poet whose The Canterbury Tales gave the English language its first great masterpiece and proved that English, not French or Latin, could carry the highest art.
Early Life
Chaucer was born around 1343 in London, the son of a prosperous wine merchant. He was educated well enough to read French and Latin, served as a page in a noble household, and fought in the Hundred Years’ War — where he was captured and ransomed. His career was that of a capable civil servant, not a cloistered poet.
Career
Chaucer served as a diplomat (traveling to Italy, where he encountered Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio), a customs official at the Port of London, a justice of the peace, and a member of Parliament. All the while he wrote: early dream-visions like The Book of the Duchess, the tragic romance Troilus and Criseyde — his greatest complete poem before the Tales — and translations including Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. In his final years he began his crowning work, The Canterbury Tales (begun c. 1387): a frame narrative in which thirty pilgrims journeying to Canterbury each tell stories, competing for a prize. He died on October 25, 1400, with the work unfinished — and was buried in Westminster Abbey, the first occupant of what became Poets’ Corner.
Major Works
The Canterbury Tales is his immortal achievement — the General Prologue’s gallery of pilgrims (Knight, Miller, Wife of Bath, Pardoner…) remains the most vivid portrait of medieval England ever drawn, and tales like the Miller’s, the Wife of Bath’s, and the Pardoner’s are masterpieces of narrative art. Troilus and Criseyde is his great tragic romance, the source for Shakespeare’s play.
Writing Style and Themes
Chaucer wrote in Middle English with unmatched irony, psychological insight, and comic timing — moving between high romance and low farce, piety and bawdiness, often within a single tale. His great themes are the gap between appearance and reality, the battle of the sexes (the Wife of Bath versus the clerks), fortune’s wheel, and storytelling itself: who tells, who listens, and what stories do to their tellers. His narrators are as fascinating as their tales.
Legacy
Chaucer made English a literary language — before him, serious writing was done in French or Latin; after him, English poetry had its founding father. The Canterbury Tales invented the story collection as we know it and remains startlingly modern: ironic, self-aware, and humane. Every English writer since stands, knowingly or not, in his debt.
