The Young H. G. Wells, Claire Tomalin
The Young H. G. Wells, Claire Tomalin
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

The Young H. G. Wells
Changing the World

Author: Claire Tomalin

Narrator: Anne Flosnik

Unabridged: 8 hr 15 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/09/2022


Synopsis

From acclaimed literary biographer Claire Tomalin, a complex and fascinating exploration of the early life of the influential writer and public figure H. G. Wells

How did the first forty years of H. G. Wells's life shape the father of science fiction?

From his impoverished childhood in a working-class English family and determination to educate himself at any cost to his complicated marriages, love affair with socialism, and the serious ill health that dominated his twenties and thirties, H. G. Wells's extraordinary early life would set him on a path to become one of the world's most influential writers. The sudden success of The Time Machine 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.

About Claire Tomalin

Claire Tomalin is the author of eight highly acclaimed biographies, including Thomas Hardy and Samuel Pepys: The Unequaled Self, which won the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year Award. She has previously won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Hawthornden Prize, the NCR Book Award for Non-Fiction, and the Whitbread Biography Award. Educated at Cambridge University, she served as literary editor of the New Statesman and the Sunday Times (London). Tomalin lives in London and is married to the playwright Michael Frayn.


Reviews

Goodreads review by MJ on May 24, 2022

H.G. was a truly remarkable force of nature, whose unrelenting passion for progressive politics, whose visionary novels and political tracts laid the foundations for the socialist ideas embedded across Europe since the end of the Second World War, were truly incredible for a man born in the 1860s. T......more

Goodreads review by V. on January 25, 2022

Over the last few decades, I've learned that Claire Tomalin writes literary biographies so well that I'm sure to find them interesting. Even if, as with H. G. Wells, the subject of her latest volume, I've no interest in the author's output. In H. G. Wells: Changing the World, Tomalin admits up front......more

Goodreads review by Nancy on October 09, 2021

Claire Tomalin’s biography of the ‘young’ Wells offers a complicated man. His rich imagination gave us iconic novels. He developed his own political and social philosophy and lifestyle. He was a man who tried to do too much, curtailing his work from perfection, and he was a man I often did not like.......more

Goodreads review by Jason on November 21, 2021

Wells is a writer who overcame childhood adversity to achieve what he did, and this book, which covers in depth his first and most productive relationship 45 years and summarises the rest, is a good account of his most famous futuristic and social novels . Wells is firmly located in the literary cli......more