Books February 1994
Poisoned Wells
A review of The Invisible Man: The Life of H.G. Wells by Michael Coren.
Michael Coren The Invisible Man: The Life and Liberties of H. G. Wells.
Atheneum, 240 pages, $22.50
reviewed by Brooke Allen
Michael Coren presents his new biography of H. G. Wells as a myth-shattering study. He had started his researches “with nothing but affection and admiration for the self-made man of so many achievements,” but soon discovered such an unpleasant side to his subject’s character that the biography perforce became a revisionist one, seeking to prove that Wells was not on the side of the angels, as other biographers had assumed, but had exercised a pernicious influence on twentieth-century thought. One can only conclude that Coren knew shockingly little about his subject when he decided to write his biography, for Wells’s less savory characteristics—his proto-fascist Utopianism, his advocacy of eugenics, his anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism—are right...
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