SELECTED SHORT STORIES 
H. G. Wells was born in 1866 and educated at a private school at Bromley, Midhurst Grammar School, and the Royal College of Science, where he studied biology with T. E. Huxley. He had two years’ apprenticeship in a draper’s shop, of which he made good use in Kipps and The History of Mr. Polly. He then insisted on cancelling his indentures (apprenticeship) and tried teaching, before turning professional writer. He wrote more than a hundred books, including novels, essays, histories, and programmes for world regeneration.
Wells, who rose from obscurity to world fame, had an emotionally and intellectually turbulent life. An apostle of socialism, science and progress, he was, in Bertrand Russell’s words, ‘an important liberator of thought and action’. He outraged public opinion with his views on free love and the impermanence of marriage expressed in the novels Ann Veronica (1909) and The New Machiavelli (1911). Wells wrote a number of fantasies; among the most famous are The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933).
His novels about the world of shabby gentility, of which he had personal experience, are among his best fiction. They include Love and Mr Lewisham (1900), Kipps (1905), Tono-Bungay (1909) and The History of Mr Polly (1910). He also collaborated on a series of modern educational works: The Outline of History (1920), The Science of Life (1929) and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1932). His Experiment in Autobiography (2 vols., 1934) reviews his world. He died in 1946.
George Orwell wrote ‘Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some sense Wells’s own creation… The mind of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed.’
- In what year was H.G. Wells born?
- Where was Wells educated?
- What subject did Wells study with T.E. Huxley?
- What were H.G. Wells fantasy stories?
- What did Wells do after cancelling his indentures?
- What did Bertrand Russell say about Wells?
- How does George Orwell describe H.G. Wells?
- How many books did H.G. Wells write?