Forester

Born on this day in 1899 (in Cairo, under the name Cecil Smith) was C.S. Forester, a novelist of a kind that was common enough in his day but now much rarer – a fine storyteller, a prolific, versatile and more than competent writer, producing entertaining high-quality fiction with wide appeal. His Hornblower novels prefigured Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, and two of his works, The African Queen and The Good Shepherd, were successfully filmed. Like Raymond Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse, he was educated as Dulwich College, and, like them, spent much time in the United States (where Forester worked during the war for the British Ministry of Information). He achieved sufficient fame to appear on an episode of You Bet Your Life, hosted by Groucho Marx, in 1956, and during the war he met the young Roald Dahl and encouraged him to take up writing (we'll forgive him for that). The Hornblower novels proved so popular that he ended up writing ten of them, between 1937 and 1962. I…