H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was an English writer, born in Bromley, Kent, to a shopkeeper and a housekeeper, apprenticed to a draper and rescued by a scholarship to study biology under T. H. Huxley. His scientific romances of the 1890s, The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds, invented much of modern science fiction. He then turned to comic novels of lower-middle-class life such as Kipps, to novels of ideas including Ann Veronica and Tono-Bungay, and to history and politics. He wrote more than a hundred books, campaigned for a world state, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize four times.