C. S. Forester
| C. S. Forester | |
| Born | |
| Died | 2 April 1966 (aged 66) |
| Occupation | novelist |
| Nationality | British |
| Genres | Adventure, drama, sea stories |
| | |
| Influenced[show] | |
Cecil Scott Forester was the pen name of Cecil Louis Troughton Smith (27 August 1899 – 2 April 1966), an English novelist who rose to fame with tales of naval warfare. His most notable works were the 11-book Horatio Hornblower series, depicting a Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic era, and The African Queen (1935; 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.
[edit] Biography
Forester was born in Cairo and educated at Alleyn's School, Dulwich College, and Guy's Hospital, but did not complete his studies there. He married Kathleen Belcher in 1926, had two sons, and divorced in 1945. His eldest son, John, is a noted cycling activist and wrote a biography of his father.
During World War II, Forester moved to the United States where he wrote propaganda to encourage that country to join the Allies. He eventually settled in Berkeley, California. While living in Washington, D.C., he met a young British intelligence officer named Roald Dahl, of whose experiences in the R.A.F. he had heard word, and encouraged him to write about them. In 1947, he secretly married a woman named Dorothy Foster. He suffered extensively from arteriosclerosis later in life.
Forester wrote many other novels, among them The African Queen (1935) and The General (1936); Peninsular War novels in Death to the French (published in the United States as Rifleman Dodd) and The Gun (filmed as The Pride and the Passion in 1957); and seafaring stories that did not involve Hornblower, such as Brown on Resolution (1929); The Captain from Connecticut (1941); The Ship (1943) and Hunting the Bismarck (1959), which was used as the basis of the screenplay for the 1960 film Sink the Bismarck! Several of his works were filmed, most notably the 1951 film The African Queen, directed by John Huston. Forester is also credited as story writer for several movies not based on his published fiction, including Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942).
He wrote several volumes of short stories set during the Second World War. Those in The Nightmare (1954) were based on events in Nazi Germany, ending at the Nuremberg Trials. Stories in The Man in the Yellow Raft (1969) followed the career of the destroyer USS Boon, while many of those in Gold from Crete (1971) followed the destroyer HMS Apache. The last of the stories in the latter book—"If Hitler had invaded England"—offers an imagined sequence of events starting with Hitler's attempt to implement Operation Sea Lion, and culminating in the early military defeat of Nazi Germany in the summer of 1941.
His non-fiction seafaring works include The Age of Fighting Sail (1956), an account of the sea battles between Great Britain and the United States in the War of 1812.
In addition to his novels of seafaring life, Forester also published two crime novels, Payment Deferred (1926), and Plain Murder (1930), and two children's books. One, Poo-Poo and the Dragons (1942), was created as a series of stories told to his younger son to encourage him to finish his meals. George had mild food allergies that kept him feeling unwell, and he needed encouragement to eat.[1] The second, The Barbary Pirates (1953), is a children's history of those early 19th-century pirates.
British author Roald Dahl's writing career began after he met Forester in early 1942. According to Dahl's autobiographical Lucky Break, Forester asked Dahl about his experiences as a fighter pilot. This prompted Dahl to write his first story, A Piece of Cake
[edit] Works
- 1924 A Pawn among Kings. Methuen.
- 1924 The Paid Piper. Methuen.
- 1924 Napoleon and his Court. Methuen.
- 1925 Josephine, Napoleon's Empress. Methuen.
- 1926 Payment Deferred. Methuen.
- 1927 Love Lies Dreaming. John Lane.
- 1927 The Wonderful Week. John Lane.
- 1927 Victor Emmanuel II and the Union of Italy. Methuen.
- 1928 The Shadow of the Hawk. John Lane.
- 1928 Louis XIV, King of France and Navarre. Methuen.
- 1929 Brown on Resolution. John Lane.
- 1929 Nelson. John Lane.
- 1929 The Voyage of the Annie Marble. John Lane.
- 1930 Plain Murder. John Lane.
- 1930 The Annie Marble in Germany. John Lane.
- 1931 Two-and-Twenty. John Lane.
- 1931 U 97. John Lane.
- 1932 Death to the French. John Lane.
- 1933 The Gun. John Lane.
- 1933 Nurse Cavell. (with CE Bechhofer Roberts) John Lane.
- 1934 The Peacemaker. Heinemann.
- 1935 The African Queen. Heinemann.
- 1936 The General. Michael Joseph.
- 1936 Marionettes at Home. Michael Joseph.
- 1937 The Happy Return. Michael Joseph.
- 1938 A Ship of the Line. Michael Joseph.
- 1938 Flying Colours. Michael Joseph.
- 1940 The Earthly Paradise. Michael Joseph.
- 1941 The Captain from Connecticut. Michael Joseph.
- 1942 Poo-Poo and the Dragons. Michael Joseph.
- 1943 The Ship. Michael Joseph.
- 1944 The Bedchamber Mystery to which is added the story of The Eleven Deckchairs and Modernity and Maternity. S. J. Reginald Saunders.
- 1945 The Commodore. Michael Joseph.
- 1945 The Happy Return. Stockerman.
- 1946 Lord Hornblower. Michael Joseph.
- 1948 The Sky and the Forest. Michael Joseph.
- 1950 Mr Midshipman Hornblower. Michael Joseph.
- 1950 Randall and the River of Time. Michael Joseph.
- 1952 Lieutenant Hornblower. Michael Joseph.
- 1952 Horatio Hornblower. Michael Joseph.
- 1953 Hornblower and the Atropos. Michael Joseph.
- 1954 The Nightmare. Michael Joseph.
- 1954 The Adventures of John Wetherell. Michael Joseph.
- 1955 The Good Shepherd. Michael Joseph.
- 1956 The Barbary Pirates. Macdonald.
- 1957 The Naval War of 1812. Michael Joseph.
- 1957 The Age of Fighting Sail.
- 1958 Hornblower in the West Indies. Michael Joseph.
- 1959 Hunting the Bismarck. Michael Joseph.
- 1962 Hornblower and the Hotspur. Michael Joseph.
- 1964 The Young Hornblower. Michael Joseph.
- 1964 The Hornblower Companion. Michael Joseph.
- 1965 Captain Hornblower. Michael Joseph.
- 1967 Hornblower and the Crisis, an unfinished novel. Michael Joseph.
- 1967 Long before Forty. Michael Joseph.
- 1968 Admiral Hornblower. Michael Joseph.
- 1969 The Man in the Yellow Raft. Michael Joseph.
- 1971 Gold from Crete. Michael Joseph.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Poo-Poo and the Dragons: Preface
[edit] References
- John Forester: Novelist & Storyteller. The Life of C. S. Forester, ISBN 0-940558-04-1 (excerpt).
[edit] External links
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