H. G. Wells

Herbert George Wells was born the son of professional cricket player—a low-paying occupation at the time—and a housemaid, the youngest of four children. As a child, Wells suffered a badly broken leg that left him bedridden for several months. To pass the time, his father loaned a stack of novels from the public library which Wells tore through, losing himself in the tales of far-off worlds and beginning his lifelong love of literature. Wells’s family had always struggled financially, and as a teenager Wells apprenticed in a number of trades, all of which were miserable. Wells eventually managed to escape the apprentice’s lot by getting himself into a grammar school, where he studied as a senior student and worked as a mentor to younger students. Excelling in academics, Wells won a scholarship and went on to study biology at what is now the Imperial College in London. During this time, Wells joined a debate society which kindled his interests in social reform, and later, socialism. During his time in college, Wells also began dabbling in fiction writing, prototyping an early version of The Time Machine in a school magazine. Wells left the Imperial College, continuing to teach at various schools—as a teacher, Wells instructed A. A. Milne, author of the Winnie-the-Pooh series—and finally finished a degree in zoology. While living with his aunt, Wells earned a living writing short articles and humor pieces for various journals, which he was quite successful at. This success emboldened him to try his hand at novel-writing, and he produced his first novel, The Time Machine, in 1895. This marked the beginning of a prolific writing period in which Wells wrote The War of the Worlds, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Wonderful Visit, and The Wheels of Chance, all within a two-year period. Although Wells is most remembered for his science fiction novels—a genre that he played a significant role in pioneering—he also wrote several utopian novels, such as A Modern Utopia, and eventually shifted to writing political and intellectual pieces. With these, Wells garnered a reputation for himself as a reformist and a futurist, a visionary of humanity’s future development. Indeed, much of his work seems almost prophetic, predicting tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, and even surmised an early concept of the Internet. During his later years, Wells’s reputation as writer declined as he continued to promote his socialist ideals to a Western audience that was less and less interested. Wells was married multiple times and had four children, two of whom were out of wedlock (throughout his life, Wells had numerous affairs, including a brief one with American activist Margaret Sanger). He died of unknown causes in London in 1946.