The English author Herbert George Wells began his career as a novelist with a popular sequence of science fiction that remains the most familiar part of his work. He later wrote realistic novels and novels of ideas.

On Sept. 21, 1866, H. G. Wells was born in Bromley, Kent. His origins were lower middle class, his father being a semiprofessional cricket player and his mother an intermittent housekeeper. At the age of 7 Wells entered Morley's School in Bromley, leaving at the age of 14, when he became apprenticed to a draper. He rebelled against this fate in 1883. After a year of teaching at a private school, he won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science at South Kensington in 1884, where he studied under the biologist T. H. Huxley. Wells left Kensington without a degree in 1887, returning to teaching in private schools for three years. He received a degree in science from the University of London in 1890.

Wells began teaching at a correspondence college in London in 1891 after his marriage to his cousin Isabel. The marriage was both difficult and brief. In the same year he published his article "The Rediscovery of the Unique" in the Fortnightly Review. After three years of writing on educational topics, he published his first novel, The Time Machine. Divorcing his first wife, Wells remarried in 1895 and abandoned teaching. A series of scientific fantasies followed The Time Machine: The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Awakes (1898), The First Men in the Moon (1901), and The War in the Air (1908). Wells's involvement with socialism and radicalism had begun in 1884 and continued for the remainder of his life.

Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900), Wells's first nonscience fiction novel, concerned the relationship of men and women and introduced sex as an integral part of that relationship