for the second time, his first marriage in 1891 to his cousin Isabel Wells having lasted barely two years. Though he and Catherine Robbins (nicknamed Jane) as yet had no children (they would eventually have two sons), Wells was obliged to work nonstop to generate enough income to keep two people alive. As he would say in a 1919 letter to his friend E. S. P Haynes:

Earning a living by writing is a frightful gamble. It depends neither on knowledge nor literary quality but upon secondary considerations of timeliness, mental fashion & so forth almost beyond control. I have been lucky but it took me eight years, while I was teaching & doing anxious journalism, to get established upon a comfortably paying footing (quoted in Norman MacKenzie and Jeanne MacKenzie, H. G. Wells: a Biography, p. 103).

“Anxious journalism” meant writing an article on any subject whatever—from cricket, to swearing, to head colds—and hoping someone would publish it.

It was W.E. Henley, an editor Wells had met in 1893, who gave Wells his big chance. Henley was just about to inaugurate a new magazine, The New Review, and offered to publish The Time Machine, whose earlier, cruder version he’d already seen, as a serial. It was Henley who told Wells to stop talking about time travel and instead take his readers on a voyage through time. He also convinced the book publisher William Heinemann to publish the serial as a volume, securing a contract for Wells that gave him a much-needed £50 advance, a first edition of 10,000 copies, and a 15 percent royalty rate. The serial was a wild success, and the novel a bestseller. H. G. Wells overnight found himself transformed from a hack writer one step ahead of starvation and bill collectors into a prominent author.

But success did not tempt Wells into inactivity. In 1896 his most Swift-inspired novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau, appeared, and in 1897 he published his third science fantasy, The Invisible Man. But these major works are merely the tip of the iceberg: Wells also published a comic novel about the bicycling craze in which he enthusiastically participated, The Wheels of Chance (1896), along with two collections of short stories and a slew of miscellaneous articles.

How could this unhealthy man (he suffered from tuberculosis and became seriously ill in 1887 and once again in 1893), totally untrained in “creative writing,” plying the journalist’s trade just to make ends meet, have both the imagination and the will to write—with no typewriter—so many words, compose so many tales? (True enough, he did have help: His second wife made clean copies of his manuscripts.) But the fact is Wells probably wrote much as he had spoken when he addressed his classes as a young teacher. Just as his lectures would have to be pitched to the level of his students, with a vocabulary they could readily fathom and a sentence structure that would elucidate rather than obfuscate the points he wanted to communicate, his fictions are exercises in clarity, and no less didactic than his lectures. In his satiric essay on Henry James (in his 1915 novel Boon), Wells castigated James for his notoriously convoluted style, comparing it to a hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea, and in a letter to James Joyce, whose work he admired but found overly complex, he stated simply, “I want language and statement as simple and clear as possible” (quoted in Michael Foot, The History of Mr. Wells, p. 215). Wells could never espouse the “art-for-art’s -sake” ideal: For him, art—all writing, in fact—had a single purpose, to communicate ideas and provoke change.

Wells was a self-made man: His literary talent earned him immortality. His social thought, expressed in countless fictions and essays, made him a kind of prophet. His views on history, as expressed in his Outline of History (1920), an international bestseller, fostered the very idea of universal history. But while his presence in the twenty-first century imagination remains huge thanks to works like The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, his presence in the social and political discourse of the new century is practically nonexistent.

The reason, simply put, is that Wells’s strength was also his weakness. The great nineteenth-century thinkers whose ideas are still current are those who created a school, a movement, a political party, something that transcended them as individuals. Karl Marx is more than a political philosopher toiling away in the academic wilderness. Sigmund Freud is more than a Viennese physician with newfangled ideas about