Bimal Mitra (1912 –91) wrote over one hundred novels and short stories, giving up his job with the Indian Railways at the age of 1938 to become a full-time writer. His novels were sprawling sagas, as was typical of the work of many of his contemporaries, telling sweeping tales of class conflict set against the fast-changing social, political, and economic backdrop of Bengal in the late nineteenth and early-to-middle twentieth centuries. Saheb Bibi Golam (King, Queen, Jack) was the most acclaimed of his novels, but he wrote several others that were equally ambitious and memorable.