Contributor

H.G. Wells

(1866 - 1946)

H.G. Wells worked as an apprentice to a draper and an assistant to a chemist before winning a scholarship at the age of eighteen that allowed him to study with the biologist T.H. Huxley. He published his first book, Textbook of Biology, in 1893 and his first novel, The Time Machine, in 1895. “It’s my trump card,” he wrote to a friend about the book, which became an immediate success. Over the next two years, Wells published The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Invisible Man.

All Writing

Voices In Time

1910 | Edinburgh

Elements of Surprise

H.G. Wells ponders the power of a little lump of stuff.More

The path of social advancement is, and must be, strewn with broken friendships.

—H.G. Wells, 1905

Voices In Time

802,701 | London

Humanity on the Wane

H.G. Wells changes climates.More

Voices In Time

1896 | Island of Dr. Moreau

Man of Science

H.G. Wells manufactures monsters.More

Miscellany

On October 30, 1938, a CBS radio announcer presented the 8 p.m. broadcast: “Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.” After the 23-year-old Welles read an ominous introduction and the “music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra” played, bulletins followed with reports of Martians crash-landing in New Jersey. Many listeners thought that the Welles-Wells adaptation was news: some people crowded highways trying to flee from aliens; others pleaded with police for gas masks. Welles said at the broadcast’s end that it was only a “holiday offering” in anticipation of Halloween.