The Barbary Pirates

CECIL LOUIS TROUGHTON SMITH (27 August 1899 - 2 April 1966), known by his pen name Cecil Scott “C. S.” Forester, was an English novelist known for writing tales of naval warfare, such as the 12-book Horatio Hornblower series, depicting a Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic wars. Two of these books, A Ship of the Line and Flying Colours, were jointly awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1938.

Born in Cairo, Egypt, he moved to London as a child and was educated at Alleyn’s School and Dulwich College, south London. He began a medicine degree at London’s Guy’s Hospital, but left to pursue a full-time writing career in 1921.

In addition to the Hornblower series and The African Queen (1935), filmed in 1951 by John Huston, Forester wrote many other novels, including: The General (1936); Peninsular War novels in Death to the French (published in the U.S. as Rifleman Dodd); The Gun, filmed as The Pride and the Passion in 1957; and seafaring stories such as Brown on Resolution (1929), The Captain from Connecticut (1941), and Hunting the Bismarck (1959), which was used as the basis of the screenplay for the film Sink the Bismarck! (1960).

He died in Fullerton, California in 1966 aged 66.