Patrick O’Brian

(1914 - 2000)

The author Patrick O’Brian published his first book, Caesar: The Life Story of a Panda Leopard, at the age of fifteen in 1930; his father, in the foreword, noted that the “immaturity of literary style and method—which are quite unspoiled by any senior pen—may also contribute to its favorable reception.” Having spent much of the 1960s translating works by French writers, Simone de Beauvoir among them, O’Brian published Master and Commander in 1969; it became the first of twenty novels in the Aubrey/Maturin series.