Birthday: Charlie Allnut, Rose Sayre, and Horatio Hornblower all sprang from Forester's pen over a couple of years in the Thirties

Cecil Louis Troughton Forester (C.S. Forester) (1899-1966)

Author

Recipient, The James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 1938

Born in Cairo and raised in London, Forester was rejected for military service in World War I and set out to become a professional writer. From 1921 to 1935 he made a middling living, then exploded into fame with The African Queen, made into a legendary film in 1951. Two years later he published the first of the twelve Horatio Hornblower novels, in which modern readers all see Gregory Peck in the title role.

The Hornblower novels portrayed one ambitious British sailor’s career in the Napoleonic Era. A stickler for efficiency and discipline, plagued by self-doubt and class-consciousness, a hater of Wordsworth’s poetry and prone to seasickness, Hornblower fought on the fringes of the great battles of the time, mostly around the Peninsular War of 1814. Fans of his work gravitated naturally to Patrick O’Brien’s twenty-volume Aubrey-Maturin series of 1969-2000, which, in contrast, placed the career of sailor Jack Aubrey in the thick of everything happening everywhere.

Forester worked for the British government in America in World War II, settling in California after the conflict ended. He was a prolific writer, with over sixty titles to his credit (another of his postwar books became the hit film, Sink the Bismarck!). During the war he met and encouraged  a British pilot and aspiring writer, Roald Dahl. Forester’s works include historical works, crime novels, plays and at least one racy romance, The Pursued. Completed in 1935, its publication was delayed at Forester’s request. He feared its James M. Cain-like plot would hurt sales of the coming Hornblower series; it was lost in the fog of war and not published until 2011, when Forester, nearly half a century gone, impressed fans with his ability to steam the windows in any love nest:

"Marjorie came into his arms, out of a desert of indecision into a sweet oasis of heedless submission. The bed was there beside them. For one second, like a lightning flash across a darkened sky, the thought came into Marjorie's mind that her husband was a murderer. When it had passed all that remained was a greater eagerness to anticipate this new lover's every wish. [George] Ely was an inexperienced lover, gentle and yet clumsy, infinitely tender while passion tore at him. Marjorie felt her whole heart and soul go out to him, in love."

Related sites:

The C.S. Forester Society

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