h g wells биография на английском

H.G. Wells

Who Was H.G. Wells?

H.G. Wells’ parents were shopkeepers in Kent, England. His first novel, The Time Machine was an instant success and Wells produced a series of science fiction novels which pioneered our ideas of the future. His later work focused on satire and social criticism. Wells laid out his socialist views of human history in his Outline of History.

Early Life

H.G. Wells was born Herbert George Wells on September 21, 1866, in Bromley, England. Wells came from a working class background. His father played professional cricket and ran a hardware store for a time. Wells’s parents were often worried about his poor health. They were afraid that he might die young, as his older sister had. At the age of 7, Wells had an accident that left him bedridden for several months. During this time, the avid young reader went through many books, including some by Washington Irving and Charles Dickens.

After Wells’ father’s shop failed, his family, which included two older brothers, struggled financially. The boys were apprenticed to a draper, and his mother went to work on an estate as a housekeeper. At his mother’s workplace, Wells discovered the owner’s extensive library. He read the works of Jonathan Swift and some of the important figures of the Enlightenment, including Voltaire.

In his early teens, Wells also went to work as a draper’s assistant. He hated the job and eventually quit, much to his mother’s dismay. Turning to teaching, Wells soon found a way to continue his own studies. He won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science where he learned about physics, chemistry, astronomy and biology, among other subjects.

Wells also devoted much of his time to becoming a writer. During college, he published a short story about time travel called «The Chronic Argonauts,» which foreshadowed his future literary success.

Literary Success: ‘The Time Machine’ and ‘War of the Worlds’

In 1895, Wells became an overnight literary sensation with the publication of the novel The Time Machine. The book was about an English scientist who develops a time travel machine. While entertaining, the work also explored social and scientific topics, from class conflict to evolution. These themes recurred in some of his other popular works from this time.

Wells continued to write what some have called scientific romances, but others consider early examples of science fiction. In quick succession, he published the The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). The Island of Doctor Moreau told the story of a man who encounters a scientist conducting the gruesome experiments on animals, creating new species of creatures. In The Invisible Man, Wells explores the life of another scientist who undergoes a dark personal transformation after turning himself invisible. The War of the Worlds, a novel about an alien invasion, later caused a panic when an adaptation of the tale was broadcast on American radio. On Halloween night of 1938, Orson Welles went on the air with his version of The War of the Worlds, claiming that aliens had landed in New Jersey.

In addition to his fiction, Wells wrote many essays, articles and nonfiction books. He served as a book reviewer for the Saturday Review for several years, during which time he promoted the careers of James Joyce and Joseph Conrad. In 1901, Wells published a non-fiction book called Anticipations. This collection of predictions has proved to be remarkably accurate. Wells forecasted the rise of major cities and suburbs, economic globalization, and aspects of future military conflicts. Remarkably, considering his support for women and women’s rights, Wells did not predict the rise of women in the workplace.

Politically, Wells supported socialist ideals. For a time, he was a member of the Fabian Society, a group that sought social reform and believed that the best political system was socialism. Wells explored issues of social class and economic disparity in a number of his works, including Kipps (1905). Kipps was one of Wells’s favorites of his own work.

READ NEXT

Megan Thee Stallion

Bowen Yang

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg

Over the years, he wrote several more comedies, including 1916’s Mr. Britling Sees It Through. This wildly popular novel looks at a writer living in a small English village before, during and after World War I. Also around this time, Wells again demonstrated his affinity for predictions. He foresaw the splitting of atom and the creation of atomic bombs in The World Set Free (1914).

Later Works: ‘The Outline of History’

In 1920, Wells published The Outline of History, perhaps his best selling work during his lifetime. This three-volume tome began with prehistory and followed the world’s events up through World War I. Wells believed there would be another major war to follow, and included his ideas for the future. Lobbying for a type of global socialism, he suggested the creation of a single government for the entire world. Around this time, Wells also tried to advance his political ideas in the real world. He ran for Parliament as a Labour Party candidate in 1922 and 1923, but both efforts ended in failure.

Wells branched out into film in the 1930s. Traveling to Hollywood, he adapted his 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come for the big screen. His 1936 film, called Things to Come, took audiences on a journey from the next world war into the distant future. Around this same time, Wells worked on the film version of one of his short stories, «The Man Who Could Work Miracles.»

An internationally famous intellectual and author, Wells traveled widely. He visited Russia in 1920 where he met with Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. More than a decade later, Wells had the opportunity to talk with Josef Stalin and American president Franklin D. Roosevelt. He also lectured and went on speaking tours, gaining notoriety for his radical social and political views. Taking a break from war-torn London in 1940, Wells came to the United States. He delivered a talk entitled «Two Hemispheres—One World.»

Personal Life

In 1891, Wells married his cousin, Isabel Mary Wells, but the union didn’t last. Wells soon took up with Amy Catherine «Jane» Robbins and the pair married in 1895 after he officially divorced Isabel. He and Jane had two children together, sons George Philip and Frank.

Death and Legacy

For roughly 50 years, Wells devoted his life to writing and his output during this time was amazing. Some even criticized Wells for his tremendous volume of work, saying that he spread his talent too thin. Wells wrote, on average, three books a year for a time. And each of his works went through several drafts before publication.

Источник

H.G. Wells

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

At age 18, H.G. Wells won a scholarship to study biology at the Normal School of Science in London, where he studied under T.H. Huxley. He graduated from London University in 1888 and became a science teacher. His study of biology spurred him to hope that human society might evolve into higher forms.

H.G. Wells was a versatile author. The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, his early publications, were science fiction novels that remain classics today. The War of the Worlds gave popular mythology to the image of the Martian. He went on to write comic novels of lower middle-class life and popular educational books.

H.G. Wells was an optimist of a type characteristic of his generation, which was breaking free from Victorian norms. He believed in the doctrine of social progress and championed sexual freedom. After Word War I, however, Wells became more pessimistic about human progress, as reflected in the bitter tone of his later books.

H.G. Wells, in full Herbert George Wells, (born September 21, 1866, Bromley, Kent, England—died August 13, 1946, London), English novelist, journalist, sociologist, and historian best known for such science fiction novels as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds and such comic novels as Tono-Bungay and The History of Mr. Polly.

Early life

Wells was the son of domestic servants turned small shopkeepers. He grew up under the continual threat of poverty, and at age 14, after a very inadequate education supplemented by his inexhaustible love of reading, he was apprenticed to a draper in Windsor. His employer soon dismissed him; and he became assistant to a chemist, then to another draper, and finally, in 1883, an usher at Midhurst Grammar School. At 18 he won a scholarship to study biology at the Normal School (later the Royal College) of Science, in South Kensington, London, where T.H. Huxley was one of his teachers. He graduated from London University in 1888, becoming a science teacher and undergoing a period of ill health and financial worries, the latter aggravated by his marriage, in 1891, to his cousin, Isabel Mary Wells. The marriage was not a success, and in 1894 Wells ran off with Amy Catherine Robbins (died 1927), a former pupil, who in 1895 became his second wife.

Early writings

Wells’s first published book was a Textbook of Biology (1893). With his first novel, The Time Machine (1895), which was immediately successful, he began a series of science fiction novels that revealed him as a writer of marked originality and an immense fecundity of ideas: The Wonderful Visit (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The First Men in the Moon (1901), and The Food of the Gods (1904). He also wrote many short stories, which were collected in The Stolen Bacillus (1895), The Plattner Story (1897), and Tales of Space and Time (1899). For a time he acquired a reputation as a prophet of the future, and indeed, in The War in the Air (1908), he foresaw certain developments in the military use of aircraft. But his imagination flourished at its best not in the manner of the comparatively mechanical anticipations of Jules Verne but in the astronomical fantasies of The First Men in the Moon and The War of the Worlds, from the latter of which the image of the Martian has passed into popular mythology.

Behind his inventiveness lay a passionate concern for man and society, which increasingly broke into the fantasy of his science fiction, often diverting it into satire and sometimes, as in The Food of the Gods, destroying its credibility. Eventually, Wells decided to abandon science fiction for comic novels of lower middle-class life, most notably in Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900), Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul (1905), and The History of Mr. Polly (1910). In these novels, and in Tono-Bungay (1909), he drew on memories of his own earlier life, and, through the thoughts of inarticulate yet often ambitious heroes, revealed the hopes and frustrations of clerks, shop assistants, and underpaid teachers, who had rarely before been treated in fiction with such sympathetic understanding. In these novels, too, he made his liveliest, most persuasive comment on the problems of Western society that were soon to become his main preoccupation. The sombre vision of a dying world in The Time Machine shows that, in his long-term view of humanity’s prospects, Wells felt much of the pessimism prevalent in the 1890s. In his short-term view, however, his study of biology led him to hope that human society would evolve into higher forms, and with Anticipations (1901), Mankind in the Making (1903), and A Modern Utopia (1905), he took his place in the British public’s mind as a leading preacher of the doctrine of social progress. About this time, too, he became an active socialist, and in 1903 joined the Fabian Society, though he soon began to criticize its methods. The bitter quarrel he precipitated by his unsuccessful attempt to wrest control of the Fabian Society from George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb in 1906–07 is retold in his novel The New Machiavelli (1911), in which the Webbs are parodied as the Baileys.

Middle and late works

After about 1906 the pamphleteer and the novelist were in conflict in Wells, and only The History of Mr. Polly and the lighthearted Bealby (1915) can be considered primarily as fiction. His later novels are mainly discussions of social or political themes that show little concern for the novel as a literary form. Wells himself affected not to care about the literary merit of his work, and he rejected the tutelage of the American novelist Henry James, saying, “I would rather be called a journalist than an artist.” Indeed, his novel Boon (1915) included a spiteful parody of James. His next novel, Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916), though touched by the prejudice and shortsightedness of wartime, gives a brilliant picture of the English people in World War I.

World War I shook Wells’s faith in even short-term human progress, and in subsequent works he modified his conception of social evolution, putting forward the view that man could only progress if he would adapt himself to changing circumstances through knowledge and education. To help bring about this process of adaptation Wells began an ambitious work of popular education, of which the main products were The Outline of History (1920; revised 1931), The Science of Life (1931), cowritten with Julian Huxley and G.P. Wells (his elder son by his second wife), and The Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind (1932). At the same time he continued to publish works of fiction, in which his gifts of narrative and dialogue give way almost entirely to polemics. His sense of humour reappears, however, in the reminiscences of his Experiment in Autobiography (1934).

In 1933 Wells published a novelized version of a film script, The Shape of Things to Come. (Produced by Alexander Korda, the film Things to Come [1936] remains, on account of its special effects, one of the outstanding British films of the 20th century.) Wells’s version reverts to the utopianism of some earlier books, but as a whole his outlook grew steadily less optimistic, and some of his later novels contain much that is bitterly satiric. Fear of a tragic wrong turning in the development of the human race, to which he had early given imaginative expression in the grotesque animal mutations of The Island of Doctor Moreau, dominates the short novels and fables he wrote in the later 1930s. Wells was now ill and aging. With the outbreak of World War II, he lost all confidence in the future, and in Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945) he depicts a bleak vision of a world in which nature has rejected, and is destroying, humankind.

Источник

H. G. Wells Biography

Also Known As: Herbert George Wells

Born in: Bromley, Kent, England

Spouse/Ex-: Amy Catherine Robbins (1895–1927), her death), Isabel Mary Wells (1891–1894)

father: Joseph Wells

children: Anthony West, G. P. Wells

place of death: London, England

Founder/Co-Founder: Diabetes UK

education: Royal College of Science, Imperial College London

Recommended For You

Who was H. G. Wells?

Herbert George Wells, often referred to as H. G. Wells, was an English writer best known for his science fiction works that gave a vision of the future. He was well-known for being proficient in many other genres as well, and had written several novels, short stories, biographies, and autobiographies. An avid reader since a very young age, he read books by Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, and many other important writers of the Enlightenment period. His works were influenced by them in some way or the other. While in college, he devoted a lot of his time to writing and one of his short stories about time travel, ‘The Chronic Argonauts’, published in a journal, displayed his talent as an upcoming writer. A futurist, he became a literary sensation with the publication of his novel ‘The Time Machine’. Besides fiction, he wrote social satires, essays, articles, and non-fiction books as well. He also worked as a book reviewer for many years and promoted the careers of other writers like James Joyce and Joseph Conrad. An outspoken socialist, he openly supported pacifist views, and most of his later works were political and pedagogic. Wells was also an artist, and often illustrated the endpapers and title pages of his own works. Even after seven decades of his death, he is remembered as a futurist and a great author.

Источник

The Life and Work of H.G. Wells

The prolific author of ‘The Time Machine’ and ‘The War of the Worlds’

Herbert George Wells, more commonly known as H.G. Wells (September 21, 1866-August 13, 1946), was a prolific English author of fiction and non-fiction. Wells is best-remembered, however, for his famous science fiction novels and uncanny predictions about the future.

Fast Facts: H.G. Wells

Early Years

H.G. Wells was born on September 21, 1866, in Bromley, England. His parents, Joseph Wells and Sarah Neal, worked as domestic servants before using a small inheritance to purchase a hardware store. Known as Bertie to his family, Wells had three older siblings. The family lived in poverty for many years as the store provided a limited income due to poor location and inferior merchandise.

At the age of 7, after Wells suffered an accident that left him bedridden, he became a voracious reader of everything from Charles Dickens to Washington Irving. When the family store finally went under, his mother went to work as a housekeeper at a large estate. It was there Wells was able to expand his literary horizons with authors such as Voltaire.

At the age of 18, Wells received a scholarship to the Normal School of Science, where he studied biology. He later attended London University. After graduating in 1888, Wells became a science teacher. His first book, the «Textbook of Biology,» was published in 1893.

Personal Life

Wells married his cousin, Isabel Mary Wells, in 1891, but left her in 1894 for a former student, Amy Catherine Robbins. The couple married in 1895. Wells’ first fiction novel, «The Time Machine,» was published the same year. The book brought Wells instant fame, inspiring him to embark on a serious career as a writer.

Famous Works

Wells long- and short-form fiction falls into many genres, including science-fiction, fantasy, dystopian fiction, satire, and tragedy. Wells penned plenty of non-fiction, including biographies, autobiographies, social commentaries, and textbooks as well as social commentary, history, biography, autobiography, and recreational war games.

Wells’ 1895 debut, «The Time Machine,» was followed by «The Island of Doctor Moreau» (1896), «The Invisible Man» (1897), and «The War of the Worlds» (1898). All four novels have been adapted for film, however, one of the most famous renditions of a Wells work was by Orson Welles, whose radio adaptation of «The War of the Worlds» was broadcast on October 30, 1938.

The reports that many listeners, not realizing what they were hearing was a radio play rather than a news broadcast and were so terrorized at the prospect of an alien invasion that they fled their homes in fear has since been debunked. However, the panic story was accepted for years and became one of the most enduring urban legends ever perpetrated in the name of a publicity campaign.

Death

H.G. Wells died on August 13, 1946, at the age of 79 of unspecified causes (his death has been attributed to a heart attack or a liver tumor). Wells’ ashes were scattered at sea in Southern England near a series of three chalk formations known as Old Harry Rocks.

Impact and Legacy

H.G. Wells liked to say that he wrote «scientific romances.» Today, we refer to this style of writing as science fiction. Wells’ influence on this genre is so significant that he, along with French author Jules Verne, share the title of «the father of science fiction.»

Wells was among the first to write about such things as time machines and alien invasions. His most famous works have never been out of print, and their influence is still apparent in modern books, films, and television shows.

Wells also made a number of social and scientific predictions in his writing—including airplane and space travel, the atomic bomb, and even the automatic door—that have since come to pass. These prophetic imaginings are part of Wells’ legacy and one of the things he is most famous for.

Quotes

H.G. Wells often commented on art, people, government, and social issues. Here are some characteristic examples:

«I found that, taking almost anything as a starting point and letting my thoughts play about with it, there would presently come out of the darkness, in a manner quite inexplicable, some absurd or vivid little nucleus.»

«Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions, great or small.»

«If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.»

Источник

H G Wells

Herbert George Wells English author and political philosopher, most famous for his science-fantasy novels with their prophetic depictions of the triumphs of technology as well as the horrors of 20th-century warfare. Wells was born September 21, 1866, in Bromley, Kent, and educated at the Normal School of Science in London, to which he won a scholarship. He worked as a draper’s apprentice, bookkeeper, tutor, and journalist until 1895, when he became a full- time writer. Wells’s 10-year relationship with Rebecca West produced a son, Anthony West, in 1914. In the next 50 years he produced more than 80 books. His novel The Time Machine mingled science, adventure, and political comment. Later works in this genre are The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, and The Shape of Things to Come; each of these fantasies was made into a motion picture. Wells also wrote novels devoted to character delineation. Among these are Kipps and The History of Mr. Polly, which depict members of the lower middle class and their aspirations. Both recall the world of Wells’s youth; the first tells the story of a struggling teacher, the second portrays a draper’s assistant. Many of Wells’s other books can be categorized as thesis novels. Among these are Ann Veronica, promoting women’s rights; Tono-Bungay, attacking irresponsible capitalists; and Mr. Britling Sees It Through, depicting the average Englishman’s reaction to war. After World War I Wells wrote an immensely popular historical work, The Outline of History. Throughout his long life Wells was deeply concerned with and wrote voluminously about the survival of contemporary society. For a time he was a member of the Fabian Society. He envisioned a utopia in which the vast and frightening material forces available to modern men and women would be rationally controlled for progress and for the equal good of all. His later works were increasingly pessimistic. ’42 to ’44 castigated most world leaders of the period; Mind at the End of Its Tether expressed the author’s doubts about the ability of humankind to survive. He also wrote An Experiment in Autobiography. Wells died August 13, 1946, in London

Источник