Forester, Cecil Scott

Forester, Cecil Scott (1899–1966), novelist and creator of Horatio Hornblower. He was brought up in London and was originally destined for the medical profession. Failing his anatomy examinations, he took to writing in a way described in a fragment of autobiography, Long before Forty, which was published after his death. Among his best-known maritime stories are Brown on Resolution (1929), an imaginary episode during the First World War (1914–18); The African Queen (1935), later made into a hugely successful film; and The Ship (1943), in which the story centres on the second battle of Sirte in the Mediterranean during the Second World War (1939–45). However, he is, of course, best known for his series of twelve novels which traces the career, from midshipman to admiral, of a Royal Navy officer, Horatio Hornblower. Set during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815), the series began in 1937 with The Happy Return (Beat to Quarters in the USA) and ended with Hornblower and the Crisis published posthumously in 1967, their development being recorded in Forester's The Hornblower Companion (1964).

The Hornblower novels, based on detailed knowledge of square-rig seamanship and sound research, are meticulously accurate in their detail of 18th- and early 19th-century naval warfare, and are now part of maritime literature. They brought Forester enormous popularity, and are as graphic as anything produced by his predecessor Frederick Marryat. Forester, who was a keen yachtsman, was invalided from the RNVR during the Second World War and spent his later years in California. Several other authors, among them Alexander Kent (Douglas Reeman), Patrick O'Brian, and Richard Woodman, have followed in his footsteps.