In one of London's outer suburbs lived a shabby insignificant schoolteacher with a repulsive, drunken wife. Experimenting with his secret invention was his only escape - until a headmaster's pacifist daughter brought sex and idealism into his life.
Then came the 'Peacemaker' - that curious lunatic who wrote to The Times threatening to spread confusion until there was total disarmament? Could the sexual ...
In one of London's outer suburbs lived a shabby insignificant schoolteacher with a repulsive, drunken wife. Experimenting with his secret invention was his only escape - until a headmaster's pacifist daughter brought sex and idealism into his life.
Then came the 'Peacemaker' - that curious lunatic who wrote to The Times threatening to spread confusion until there was total disarmament? Could the sexual awakening of this shy, retiring man have inspired him to create the chaos that now reigned throughout London?
Cecil Scott "C.S." Forester, born in Cairo in August 1899, was the fifth and last child of George Foster Smith and Sarah Medhurst Troughton. After finishing school at Dulwich College he attended Guy's Medical School but failed to finish the course, preferring to write than study. However, it was not until he was aged twenty-seven that he earned enough from his writing to live on.
During the Second World War, Forester moved to the United States where he met a young British intelligence officer named Roald Dahl, whom he encouraged to write about his experiences in the RAF.
Forester's most notable works were the Horatio Hornblower series, which depicted a Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic era, and The African Queen (filmed in 1951 by John Huston). His novels A Ship of the Line and Flying Colours were jointly awarded the 1938 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.
Biography
C. S. Forester (1899 - 1966) wrote several novels with military and naval themes, including The African Queen, The Barbary Pirates, The General, The Good Shepherd, The Gun, The Last Nine Days of the "Bismarck" and Rifleman Dodd. But Forester is best known as the creator of Horatio Hornblower, a British naval genius of the Napoleonic era, whose exploits and adventures on the high seas Forester chronicled in a series of eleven acclaimed historical novels. Over the years, Hornblower has proved to be one of the most beloved and enduring fictional heroes in English literature, his popularity rivaled only by Sherlock Holmes.
Born Cecil Louis Troughton Smith in Cairo, Egypt, Forester grew up in London. At the start of World War II, he traveled on behalf of the British government to America, where he produced propaganda encouraging the United States to remain on Britain's side. After the War, Forester remained in America and made Berkeley, California, his home.
The character of Horatio Hornblower was born after Forester was called to Hollywood to write a pirate film. While the script was being drafted, another studio released Captain Blood, starring Errol Flynn, based on the same historical incidents about which Forester was writing. Rather than seek another movie project, and to avoid an impending paternity suit, Forester jumped aboard a freighter bound for England. By the end of the voyage he had outlined Beat to the Quarters, which introduced the now legendary character Hornblower, Bush, and Lady Barbara.
Forester died in 1966 while working on Hornblower During the Crisis.
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Overview
Then came the 'Peacemaker' - that curious lunatic who wrote to The Times threatening to spread confusion until there was total disarmament? Could the sexual ...