Cecil Scott "C.S." Forester was the pen name of
Cecil Louis Troughton Smith (27 August 1899 — 2 April 1966), an English novelist who rose to fame with tales of naval warfare. His most notable works were the 11-book
Horatio HornblowerHoratio Hornblower is a fictional Royal Navy officer who is the protagonist of a series of novels by C. S. Forester. He was later the subject of films and television programs.The original Hornblower tales began with the 1937 novel The Happy Return Horatio Hornblower is a fictional Royal Navy...
series, depicting a Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic era, and
The African QueenThe African Queen is a 1935 novel written by C. S. Forester, which was adapted to the 1951 film with the same name.-Plot summary:The story opens in mid-1914. Rose Sayer, a 33-year-old English woman, is the companion and housekeeper of her brother Samuel, an Anglican missionary in Central Africa...
(1935; filmed in 1951 by
John HustonJohn Marcellus Huston was an American film director, screenwriter and actor. He wrote most of the 37 feature films he directed, many of which are today considered classics: The Maltese Falcon , The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , Key Largo , The Asphalt Jungle , The African Queen , Moulin Rouge...
). His novels
A Ship of the LineA Ship of the Line is an historical seafaring novel by C. S. Forester. It follows his fictional hero Horatio Hornblower during his tour as captain of a ship of the line. By internal chronology, A Ship of the Line, which follows The Happy Return, is the seventh book in the series...
and
Flying Colours were jointly awarded the 1938
James Tait Black Memorial PrizeFounded in 1919, the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are among the oldest and most prestigious book prizes awarded for literature written in the English language and are Britain's oldest literary awards...
for fiction.
Early years
Forester was born in
CairoCairo , is the capital of Egypt and the largest city in the Arab world and Africa, and the 16th largest metropolitan area in the world. Nicknamed "The City of a Thousand Minarets" for its preponderance of Islamic architecture, Cairo has long been a centre of the region's political and cultural life...
and educated at
Alleyn's SchoolAlleyn's School is an independent, fee-paying co-educational day school situated in Dulwich, south London, England. It is a registered charity and was originally part of the historic Alleyn's College of God's Gift charitable foundation, which also included James Allen's Girls' School , Dulwich...
,
Dulwich CollegeDulwich College is an independent school for boys in Dulwich, southeast London, England. The college was founded in 1619 by Edward Alleyn, a successful Elizabethan actor, with the original purpose of educating 12 poor scholars as the foundation of "God's Gift". It currently has about 1,600 boys,...
, and
Guy's HospitalGuy's Hospital is a large NHS hospital in the borough of Southwark in south east London, England. It is administratively a part of Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust. It is a large teaching hospital and is home to the King's College London School of Medicine...
, but did not complete his studies at the last named.
Marriage
He married Kathleen Belcher in 1926, had two sons, and divorced in 1945. His eldest son, John Forester wrote a biography of his father.
WWII
During World War II, Forester moved to the United States where he wrote propaganda to encourage that country to join the
AlliesThe Allies of World War II were the countries that opposed the Axis powers during the Second World War . Former Axis states contributing to the Allied victory are not considered Allied states...
. He eventually settled in
Berkeley, CaliforniaBerkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
. While living in Washington, D.C., he met a young British intelligence officer named
Roald DahlRoald Dahl was a British novelist, short story writer, fighter pilot and screenwriter.Born in Wales to Norwegian parents, he served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, in which he became a flying ace and intelligence agent, rising to the rank of Wing Commander...
, of whose experiences in the
RAFThe Royal Air Force is the aerial warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Formed on 1 April 1918, it is the oldest independent air force in the world...
he had heard word, and encouraged him to write about them. In 1947, he secretly married a woman named Dorothy Foster.
Career
Forester wrote many other novels, among them
The African QueenThe African Queen is a 1935 novel written by C. S. Forester, which was adapted to the 1951 film with the same name.-Plot summary:The story opens in mid-1914. Rose Sayer, a 33-year-old English woman, is the companion and housekeeper of her brother Samuel, an Anglican missionary in Central Africa...
(1935) and
The GeneralForester is best known for his famous series of Horatio Hornblower novels which he began in 1937; few of his other works are well-known: The General and The African Queen are exceptions and remain popular....
(1936);
Peninsular WarThe Peninsular War was a war between France and the allied powers of Spain, the United Kingdom, and Portugal for control of the Iberian Peninsula during the Napoleonic Wars. The war began when French and Spanish armies crossed Spain and invaded Portugal in 1807. Then, in 1808, France turned on its...
novels in
Death to the FrenchDeath to the French is a 1932 novel of the Peninsular War during the Napoleonic Wars, written by C. S. Forester, the author of the Horatio Hornblower novels...
(published in the United States as
Rifleman Dodd) and
The Gunthumb|1st US edition The Gun is a novel by C.S. Forester about an imaginary series of incidents involving a single eighteen-pound cannon during the Spanish Peninsular War against Napoleon Bonaparte...
(filmed as
The Pride and the PassionThe Pride and the Passion is a historical film drama starring Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra and Sophia Loren made by Stanley Kramer Productions. Set in the Napoleonic era, it is the story of a British officer who has orders to retrieve a huge cannon from Spain and take it to the British forces by ship...
in 1957); and seafaring stories that did not involve Hornblower, such as
Brown on ResolutionBrown on Resolution is a 1929 nautical novel written by CS Forester. It is set during World War I. The hero of the novel, seaman Brown, is the sole able-bodied survivor of a sunken British warship, who is able single-handedly to discomfit its attacker, a German cruiser, long enough to ensure its...
(1929);
The Captain from ConnecticutThe Captain from Connecticut is a novel by CS Forester, the author of the novels about fictional Royal Navy officer Horatio Hornblower. The Captain from Connecticut is set at the tail end of the Napoleonic Wars, and the War of 1812. It was written during World War II...
(1941);
The ShipThe Ship is a novel written by British author C. S. Forester set in the Mediterranean during World War II, and first published in May 1943. It follows the life of a Royal Navy light cruiser for a single action, including a detailed analysis of many of the men on board and the contribution they...
(1943) and
Hunting the BismarckThe Last Nine Days of the Bismarck , also published as Hunting the Bismark , was written by C.S...
(1959), which was used as the basis of the screenplay for the 1960 film
Sink the Bismarck!Sink the Bismarck! is a 1960 black-and-white British war film based on the book, the "Last Nine Days of the Bismarck" by C. S. Forester. It stars Kenneth More and Dana Wynter and was directed by Lewis Gilbert. To date, it is the only movie made that deals directly with the operations, chase, and...
Several of his works were filmed, most notably the 1951 film
The African Queen, directed by
John HustonJohn Marcellus Huston was an American film director, screenwriter and actor. He wrote most of the 37 feature films he directed, many of which are today considered classics: The Maltese Falcon , The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , Key Largo , The Asphalt Jungle , The African Queen , Moulin Rouge...
. Forester is also credited as story writer for several movies not based on his published fiction, including
Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942).
He wrote several volumes of short stories set during the Second World War. Those in
The Nightmare (1954) were based on events in Nazi Germany, ending at the
Nuremberg TrialsThe Nuremberg Trials were a series of military tribunals, held by the victorious Allied forces of World War II, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of the defeated Nazi Germany....
. Stories in
The Man in the Yellow Raft (1969) followed the career of the destroyer USS
Boon, while many of those in
Gold from Crete (1971) followed the destroyer HMS
Apache. The last of the stories in the latter book - "If Hitler had invaded England" - offers an imagined sequence of events starting with
HitlerAdolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
's attempt to implement Operation Sea Lion, and culminating in the early military defeat of
Nazi GermanyNazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
in the summer of 1941. His non-fiction seafaring works include
The Age of Fighting Sail (1956), an account of the sea battles between Great Britain and the United States in the
War of 1812The War of 1812 was a military conflict fought between the forces of the United States of America and those of the British Empire. The Americans declared war in 1812 for several reasons, including trade restrictions because of Britain's ongoing war with France, impressment of American merchant...
.
In addition to his novels of seafaring life, Forester also published two crime novels,
Payment DeferredPayment Deferred is a crime novel by C.S. Forester, first published in 1926.William Marble is a bank clerk living in south London, desperately worried about money and unable to control his wife Annie's spending. One evening without warning they are visited by his recently orphaned and very rich...
(1926), and
Plain Murder (1930), and two children's books. One,
Poo-Poo and the Dragons (1942), was created as a series of stories told to his younger son to encourage him to finish his meals. George had mild food allergies that kept him feeling unwell, and he needed encouragement to eat. The second,
The Barbary Pirates (1953), is a children's history of those early 19th-century pirates.
He can be seen as a contestant on the 1st November 1956 edition of
You Bet Your LifeYou Bet Your Life is an American quiz show that aired on both radio and television. The original and best-known version was hosted by Groucho Marx of the Marx Brothers, with announcer and assistant George Fenneman. The show debuted on ABC Radio in October 1947, then moved to CBS Radio in September...
, commenting that his latest book is
The Age of Fighting Sail.
In 2003 a "lost" novel of Forester's,
The Pursued was discovered and bought at an auction and was published by Penguin Classics on 3 November 2011.
British author
Roald DahlRoald Dahl was a British novelist, short story writer, fighter pilot and screenwriter.Born in Wales to Norwegian parents, he served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, in which he became a flying ace and intelligence agent, rising to the rank of Wing Commander...
's writing career began after he met Forester in early 1942. According to Dahl's autobiographical
Lucky Break, Forester asked Dahl about his experiences as a fighter pilot. This prompted Dahl to write his first story, "A Piece of Cake".
External links