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~ Herbert
George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, a
small town near London.
~ His father was a shopkeeper and a
professional cricketer until he broke his leg. His mother was a housekeeper.
~ In his early
childhood, Wells developed an appreciation for literature. While
his mother worked at the nearby estate of Uppark, young Wells
secretly studied books in the expansive library.
~ When his father's
china shop failed, Wells was apprenticed to a draper.
~ In 1883,
Wells became a teacher-pupil at Midhurst Grammar School. He won a government scholarship for trainee teachers to the
Normal School
of Science in South Kensington.
~ There, he
met T.H. Huxley, the leading expounder of Darwinism. Inspired by
his biology teacher, Wells also developed a passion for evolution.
By the second year, however, he lost all interest in school, and
left without obtaining a degree.
~ In the
summer of 1887, Wells found a teaching post at Holt Academy,
North Wales, an impoverished boarding school.
~ During a game of
football with his students, he suffered a severe blow to one kidney
and had to have it removed. On top of that, he also suffered from tuberculosis.
At the age of
21, Wells temporarily lived as a semi-invalid.
~ In 1890,
Wells earned his B.S. degree. The next year he settled in London, married his cousin Isabel
and continued his career as a teacher in a correspondence
college.
~ A few years
later, Wells left Isabel for one of his brightest students, Amy
Catherine. They married in 1895.
~ That
same year, Wells established himself as a novelist with his science
fiction story, The Time Machine.
It was a huge success.
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~ This was followed by
three more outstanding novels, The
Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds—a story of Martians invading Earth.
~ But
Wells had larger ambitions. He craved recognition as a serious
novelist and a public intellectual. At the turn of the century,
he wrote Love and Mr. Lewisham, the first of a series of
semi-autobiographical novels, and Anticipations, a book
of social and technological forecasts. He also published critical
pamphlets attacking the Victorian social order.
~ Halloween
1938, Orson
Welles' Mercury Theater aired a radio adaptation of The War of
the Worlds—done in the style
of a news broadcast—that created panic in the greater portion
of northeast America.
~ In Newark,
New Jersey, folks left their
homes with shotguns in their hands and wet towels around their heads.
~ H.G. Wells was not amused.
~ Wells
lived through World War II in his house on Regent's Park,
refusing to let the blitz drive him out of London.
~ His last
book, Mind At The End Of Its Tether, expressed pessimism about
mankind's future. He felt humans would ultimately destroy their
race via an atomic war.
~ Wells died in his sleep in London
at the age of 80.
~ In 1953, The War of the Worlds
was made into a film, and soon became a cult classic. A
newer version, directed by Steven Spielberg,
hit movie theaters in the summer of '05.
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