C.S. Forester

C. S. Forester created Horatio Hornblower and wrote The African Queen, and his naval fiction has shaped how the Napoleonic wars at sea are imagined. He was born Cecil Louis Troughton Smith in Cairo, brought up in London, abandoned medical studies, and wrote his way out. The African Queen, published in 1935, takes the East African campaign of the First World War - an obscure sideshow in which German and British forces fought over lakes and swamp for four years - and reduces it to two people, a gin-drinking riverboat mechanic and a missionary's sister, taking a launch downriver to attack a German gunboat. John Huston filmed it in 1951 with Bogart and Hepburn. The Hornblower novels, begun in 1937 and written out of order across thirty years, follow an officer who is seasick, self-doubting and tone-deaf from midshipman to admiral, and their fidelity to sailing-ship handling and to the tedium of blockade is why they are read as social history as well as adventure. Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels are the direct successor. Forester also wrote propaganda for the British Ministry of Information from the United States during the Second World War, sailed with the Royal Navy as a correspondent, and contracted the arteriosclerosis that crippled him. He wrote lying down for his last decades. He also wrote The Ship and Hunting the Bismarck, and his novel The Gun became a Sophia Loren film. Hornblower's popularity in the United States owed a good deal to Churchill, who told everyone he met that he had read the books. The name became a byword in the Royal Navy for a certain kind of officer.

• Lived: 1899 CE – 1966 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: writer