H. G. Wells

Wells was apprenticed to a draper at fourteen and hated every hour of it — thirteen-hour days, sleeping in a dormitory over the shop. He escaped through a scholarship to study biology in London under T. H. Huxley, and the training shows: his scientific romances take one impossible premise and then reason without mercy.

In seven years from 1895 he published The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds, and effectively laid out the shape of a century of science fiction. He then largely abandoned the form for social novels, journalism and enormous works of popular education, and spent decades arguing for a world state; a declaration of human rights he drafted in 1940 fed into the thinking behind the Universal Declaration.

He is not easy to admire whole. He conducted affairs and fathered children outside his marriage in a way that his partners frequently found less liberating than he did, and his early writing includes enthusiastic passages on eugenics that were fashionable in his circle and are indefensible on their own terms. He died in 1946, having lived to see the bomb he had described in 1914.