The Invisible Man

The author
H.G. Wells (1866-1946) was one of the most prolific, popular, and varied writers of the early twentieth century. His numerous works crossed genres, from science fiction to socialist treatises, from Edwardian satire to sweeping histories, from short stories to Utopian novels. He loomed large in the popular and critical imagination of the time, producing many bestsellers, andestablishing (and destroying) numerous relationships with key modernist figures like Dorothy Richardson, Rebecca West, George Bernard Shaw, and Henry James. Straddling different genres and eras, Wells remains a complicated and disputed figure.
Born in Kent on September 21, 1866 to a lower-middle-class family, Herbert George Wells led a bookish but unhappy childhood. After shortly attending Thomas Morley’sCommercial Academy, Wells was forced to go to work as an apprentice draper in 1881 after his father, a professional cricket player, broke his leg and could not support his family. The drudgery and cruelty Wells experienced during this period would serve as material for two later novels, "Kipp"s and "The Wheels of Chance".
After briefly serving as a teacher, Wells attended the Normal School ofScience, where he studied biology under T.H. Huxley and read deeply and widely in political philosophy.
Wells left the Normal School before completing his studies and moved in with his aunt and uncle, serving as a tutor to make ends meet. In 1891, he married his cousin Isabel Mary Wells; the marriage would last only four years. In 1895, he married former student Amy Catherine Robbins with whom hehad two sons. While still married, he had numerous affairs with, among others, Margaret Singer, Amber Reeves, Rebecca West, and Dorothy Richardson.
Soon becoming enamoured of socialism, Wells joined the Fabian Society, an intellectual, socialist movement that embraced reason and gradualism. He broke with the organization, which included George Bernard Shaw - member of it-, after he attempted toradicalize their strategies and philosophy. In particular, Wells encouraged the society to support a resolution rejecting the monogamous family, headed by a man, as a form of private property. Attacked by conservatives and by other socialists as a champion of "free love" and sexual anarchy, Wells failed in his attempts to take over the Fabian Society, in part because of his reputation for havingextramarital affairs with young women. (Amber Reeves was the daughter of prominent Fabians).

In 1895, Wells had a series of short stories published, and this would initiate a truly prolific period of production. From 1895 to 1901, he wrote a series of science fiction novels, including "The Time Machine", "The invisible Man" and "The War of the Worlds", and he is often credited with being afounder of this genre. Churning out oftentimes more than a book a year, Wells wrote on the future of civilization in "Anticipations" (1901), on the rise of Fascism and its charismatic leaders in "The Holy Terror" (1939), and on the entire history of the world in the oft-copied "Outline of History" (1920). His science fiction did predict many of the horrors of the twentieth century, including trenchwarfare, aerial bombardment, poison gas, the nuclear bomb, and world war. Initially an enthusiastic supporter of the First World War, he wrote a series of prowar articles, collected in late 1914 as "The War That Will End War", a title later remembered with bitter irony.
Wells was a true public intellectual, writing on issues like eugenics and his proposed World State, and by the 1920’s he was aworld celebrity. Given his constant engagement with science, politics, and contemporary ethical issues, it is easy to lose sight of his fiction, which was accomplished in its own right. In addition to writing some of the seminal novels of the science fiction genre, Wells wrote frankly about sex in his novel "Love and Mr. Lewisham" (1901), and engaged with issues of colonialism in "The War of the...