Patrick O Brian Research Paper

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Section one – Author overview and comparison Of the many authors writing naval history, there are some that take their talents to create worlds of there own that can, at times, parallel our own. The writers of historical fiction can create some incredibly entertaining works. For the purposes of this paper three authors will be focused on. These three are Patrick O’Brian, C.S. Forester and Dudley Pope. These authors are some of the most renown for their many publications. Each of them has created at least one series of novels on the premise of historical naval fiction. Patrick O’Brian created the series of novels of Captain Jack Aubrey and his companion Dr. Stephen Maturin (known as the Aubrey-Maturin series). C.S. Forester is the creator …show more content…

Born in 1914 in Chalfort St. Peter, Buckinghamshire, he would publish his first book at the young age of fifteen entitled Caesar: The life story of a panda-leopard. This was an examination of the cruelty and beauty of the world. Caesar is a creature with a giant panda for a father and a snow leopard for a mother. Even at this young age his writing style can still be felt. His fascination with the natural world and the precision of his writing are evident. At the age of twenty he underwent training with the Royal Air Force as a pilot. This, however was short lived, and O’Brian would end up in London where he would marry his first wife in 1936; having two …show more content…

The first of which is from O’Brian’s biographer Dean King, published in March on 2000. In Patrick O’Brian: A Life Revealed, King makes reference to an essay written by O’Brian in which he speaks about his involvement in the field of intelligence gathering for the British Government, where he would also meet his second wife Mary. King believes that it is these experiences in the war that inspired his character Stephen Maturin, the Irish Catholic naturalist who becomes an intelligence officer during the Napoleonic War. The second school is that of O’Brian’s stepson, Nikolai Tolstoy (son of Mary). Tolstoy refutes Kings claim that his stepfather was an intelligence officer and that he was simply a volunteer ambulance driver during the blitz (where O’Brian would meet Tolstoy’s mother Mary). O’Brian would start to work on what would become a 20 volume series in 1969, the first of which would be published that year; Master and Commander. The last, Blue at the Mizzen was first published in 1999. Though his unfinished twenty-first book would also be published in 2004 (just four years after his death), The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey (21 in the U.S.A). The series would become so successful that a feature film was released in 2003 that drew on several different books in the series for the

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