The Young H.G. Wells

Changing the World

Claire Tomalin

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A fascinating journey into the early life of H.G. Wells, the father of science fiction, from one of Britain's best biographers

How did the first forty years of H. G. Wells' life shape the father of science fiction?
From his impoverished childhood in a working-class English family, to his determination to educate himself at any cost, to the serious ill health that dominated his twenties and thirties, his complicated marriages, and love affair with socialism, the first forty years of H. G. Wells' extraordinary life would set him on a path to become one of the world's most influential writers. The sudden success of The TimeMachine and The War of The Worlds transformed his life and catapulted him to international fame; he became the writer who most inspired Orwell and countless others, and predicted men walking on the moon seventy years before it happened.
In this remarkable, empathetic biography, Claire Tomalin paints a fascinating portrait of a man like no other, driven by curiosity and desiring reform, a socialist and a futurist whose new and imaginative worlds continue to inspire today.

Published: 2 November 2021
ISBN: 9780241239971
Imprint: Viking
Format: Hardback
Pages: 272
RRP: $45.00

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Praise for The Young H.G. Wells

'Another triumph for a biographer who goes from strength to strength
Melvyn Bragg

You put down Tomalin's book knowing you have met a living author
The Times

'A moving story, and Tomalin tells it vividly, with as great a fund of sympathy and sense, as can be imagined'
Daily Telegraph on Samuel Pepys: An Unequalled Self