The age of fighting sail

Cecil Scott Forester, an Englishman, was born in Cairo in 1899, the son of a British army officer. He was educated in London, and for a time he studied medicine. After a World War I stint in the infantry, however, he decided to be a poet. This was a shortlived pursuit and he soon turned to biography and fiction. He then wrote many best-selling novels—African Queen and The General among them—before he wrote the first of his Hornblower stories in 1937. That first book was Beat to Quarters, chronologically the fifth volume in tracing the career of Hornblower. In 1940 Forester moved to Berkeley, California, where he lived for many years between his World War II and postwar travels. In April of 1966, while writing Hornblower and the Crisis, C. S. Forester died. Today, the popularity of his writing still continues to grow, and the names of both Forester and Hornblower have become synonymous with the greatest names in naval literature.