The Origin is a biographical novel

Biographical novel

The biographical novel is a genre of novel which provides a fictional and usually entertaining account of a person's life. This kind of novel concentrates on the experiences a person had during his lifetime, the people he met and the incidents which occurred are detailed and sometimes...

 of the life of Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...

 written by Irving Stone

Irving Stone

Irving Stone was an American writer known for his biographical novels of famous historical personalities, including Lust for Life, a biographical novel about the life of Vincent van Gogh, and The Agony and the Ecstasy, a biographical novel about Michelangelo.-Biography:In...

. Darwin was a geologist and biologist, and could be considered the father of evolutionary theory. The novel begins with Darwin at the age of 22 and follows him through the Voyage of the Beagle

Voyage of the Beagle

The voyage of the Beagle can refer to:*The second voyage of HMS Beagle*Charles Darwin's book about that voyage, The Voyage of the Beagle*Other voyages of HMS Beagle...

until his death in 1882.

Stone took five years to research and write the novel and consulted numerous Darwin scholars and even Darwin's descendants in order to write his version of Darwin's life.