Birthday: "Captain Hornblower? I'm Captain Kirk. James T. Kirk, of the Starship Enterprise."

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

Author

Son of an English schoolmaster, born in Cairo and shipped home at the zenith of Empire, Forester was one under-the-radar guy. He wrote under a pseudonym. He married twice, each time secretly. He veered between psychological novels and wartime propaganda. Barred from the battlefield, he loved writing of war.

Forester reached draft age the last year of the Great War, but a heart murmur kept him out of the service. He read medicine at Guy’s Hospital, London, halfheartedly, until he flunked out in 1924. Like many of his time, he turned to writing because had run out of things to try and money with which to try them.

He had some success early, but it was hit or miss; his first American editions labeled him B.S. and C.E. Forester. He didn’t earn a steady living from writing until he was nearly thirty.

His first novel was optioned for a Hollywood movie with Charles Laughton. He and his wife moved to LA. They liked the money but hated the place, and resettled in Berkeley. Aside from the first-cabin ocean voyages home he loved, and for work- he was a war correspondent in Spain and for the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia- Forester remained in America the rest of his life.

He scored another couple of hits: The African Queen (1935) enjoyed a rebirth and eternal life as a 1950s movie; and The General (1936) became an unlikely best-seller in Nazi Germany (the story of a Boer War veteran who missed the point of all his combat experiences, married well and ended up a disastrously senior World War I commander, the book was recently cited as White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s favorite military book).

Among the maximum improbabilities of Forester’s life was his mid-1930s recall to Hollywood, there to co-write a pirate movie; Warner Brothers and First National Pictures beat them to the screen with Errol Flynn's 1935 epic, Captain Blood. Arising, as the screenplay sank, was a paternity claim by a fading opera singer.

A sea voyage was called for; Forester hopped a slow freighter home, and by the time he disembarked safely on British soil, he had all plotted out the genesis of his seventeen books and stories of the career of Captain Horatio Hornblower, a rising star in the British Navy of the Napoleonic Wars.

The books came out for the next twenty-five years but sold only adequately to start. What made Forester a star was the American Book-of-the-Month Club’s 1940 decision to offer the first three Hornblowers in a snazzy slipcase.

Forester parlayed fame and success into a gig with the British Information Service- Churchill’s American propaganda arm. In DC he met and mentored a dashing, demobbed British pilot, Roald Dahl, who had some stories about his wartime experience and went on to become one of the century’s most popular writers.

After the war, Forester returned to Berkeley, his health and first marriage failing. He suffered arteriosclerosis in his legs and wanted to retire, but his editor convinced him to stick with Horatio Hornblower. His faith repaid all handsomely after the 1951 movie- with young Gregory Peck in the lead- was a smash hit.

Forester returned to the World War II with 1959’s Sink the Bismarck!, which, in its turn, yielded another hit movie. He remained prolific to the end, producing over fifty books ranging from historical biographies to mysteries to children’s books to plays. A 1962 heart attack and a 1964 stroke laid him low and he died in 1966. He got a front-page obit from The New York Times.

While his main works live on, Forester was soon forgotten. His son published a dutiful two-volume Life, but the father was never able to escape the “popular writer” bin and so has had no critical attention from scholars. A centennial exhibition at the Georgetown University Library summed him up as “a good if not particularly successful novelist and miscellaneous writer.”

But when Patrick O’Brien dusted off Forester's Hornblower genre a decade and a half later, his audience was there, ready to return to sea and do battle. And do battle his work has done, in ways he never imagined: a few months after Forester died, NBC aired a new TV series inspired by the Hornblower novels.

Its creator, Gene Roddenberry, called it Star Trek.