WELLS, HERBERT GEORGE. - English social writer and novelist, b. 21 Sept. 1866, d. 13 Aug. 1946; a disciple of T. H. Huxley, he was throughout his life a modernist and an apostle of scientific progress.
The pseudo-prophetic message that may be drawn from his entire vast body of work is that God is an automatic and unfinished god who needs man's cooperation in order to overcome the various forms of evil and fully realize himself. Some of his books, such as The time machine (1895), The war of the worlds (1898), The invisible man (1897), became popular as fantastic visions of the future of science and are read as adventure novels; others envisage and popularize social questions, but only a few possess narrative qualities, and even these do not prevail through excellence of style, since W. did not have the innate talent of a Dickens or the liveliness and wit of his friend G. B. Shaw. Among his most successful works is Tono Bungay (1909), in which the class of the English nouveaux riches at the end of the 19th century is happily characterized. The view of world history which he presents in works intended for a wide reading public, such as Short history of the world (1922), was harshly criticized by Belloc. W. has often been presented as a champion of optimistic positivism, but the tone of his latest writings often darkens into pessimism.