Ernest Charles Large (1902–76) was (in chronological order) an English industrial chemist, writer, and plant scientist, best known for his book The advance of the fungi (1940): a magisterial history of plant diseases. His novels Sugar in the air and Asleep in the afternoon come from the period of the mid- to late 1930s when he had left his work in industry and was writing full-time. In 1940 he went back into salaried employment as a research scientist. A third novel, Dawn in Andromeda, was published in 1956.