Herbert George Wells (1866 – 1946) in a poor family. At 18 he won a scholarship to study biology at the Normal School (later the Royal College) of Science, in London, where he studied under Thomas Henry Huxley, Aldous Huxley’s grandfather and later became a science teacher.
After the success of his first novel, The Time Machine (1895) Wells devoted himself to writing a series of science-fiction novels which revealed his great originality of ideas and gave him the reputation of prophet of the future. Eventually, Wells decided to abandon science fiction for comic novels of lower middle-class life; concerned for man and society and though affected by the pessimism prevalent in the 1890s, Wells continued to hope that human society would evolve into higher forms. So he became a fervent socialist and in 1903 he joined the Fabian Society, but soon left it after a quarrel with G.B. Shaw and the Webbs.
World War I shook Wells’s faith in even short-term human progress, and in his subsequent works he modified his conception of social evolution, affirming that man could only progress if he adapted himself to changing circumstances through knowledge and education.
With the outbreak of World War II, he lost all confidence in the future, and in Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945) he depicts a bleak vision of a world in which nature has rejected, and is destroying, humankind.
Among his most popular works there are:
The Time Machine (1895) , The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) , The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), The First Men in the Moon (1901) and The Food of the Gods (1904)