Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, England, on September 21, 1866. His father was a professional cricketer and occasional shopkeeper, his mother a former lady's maid. Although "Bertie" left school at fourteen to become an apprentice to a draper (a merchant who sold cloth or dry goods), he later won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London, where he studied with the famous Thomas Henry Huxley. He began to sell articles and short stories regularly in 1893 and in 1895, his immediately successful novel The Time Machine rescued him from a life of penury on a schoolteacher's salary. His other "scientific romances"—The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The First Men in the Moon (1901), and The War in the Air (1908)—won him distinction as the father of science fiction.
Henry James saw in Wells the most gifted writer of the age, but Wells, having coined the phrase "the war that will end war" to describe World War I, became increasingly disillusioned and focused his attention on educating mankind with his bestselling Outline of History (1920) and his later utopian works. Living until 1946, Wells witnessed a world more terrible than any of his imaginative visions, and he bitterly observed: "Reality has taken a leaf from my book and set itself to supersede me."
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