Introduction

The creator of Horatio Hornblower was born Cecil Lewis Troughton Smith on August 27, 1899, the son of a minor English official in the Egyptian Ministry of Education. After his death on April 2, 1966, the obituary of C. S. Forester (who started his literary career as Cecil Scott Forester in 1921) began on the front page of the New York Times, and some 8,000,000 copies of his works had been published.
 

Before Hornblower, Forester's career was that of a good, if not particularly successful, novelist and miscellaneous writer. Payment Deferred (1926), his first book to achieve multiple printings, also brought him his first sale of film rights; The African Queen (1935), later to be, because of the film starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn, the best-known of his non-Hornblower novels, began its published life as a five-part newspaper cliffhanger serial. The General (1936), one of his best-written books, achieved far greater fame (and made its author far more money) in Hitler's Germany than it did in Britain or America. Indeed, the dust jackets of two of the first three books he saw published in America gave his initials incorrectly, the first as "B. S." and another as "C. E."
 

In 1937 came the great invention: the introverted, self-doubting English sea captain who would make Forester's name in the world of popular literature, Horatio Hornblower. But sales of the first three Hornblower titles were modest by the standards Forester would later reach, and even though the second and third were serialized in American pulps prior to publication, they failed to reach a true mass audience. The publication of a boxed three-volume set of the Hornblower books by the Book of the Month Club in 1940 "made" Hornblower in America, and from the publication of Commodore Hornblower (or as it was titled in England, The Commodore) at the end of World War II, with prior serialization in The Saturday Evening Post, the appearance of each Hornblower novel or book of stories was the result of a carefully orchestrated and highly remunerative publishing campaign, with both prior and secondary serial rights sold, book club publication assured.
 

This exhibit presents, with only a few additions, the first British and American editions of all of Forester's books, including those published posthumously. It deliberately ignores the Canadian editions, the Australian editions, the Indian editions, the English-language editions published in Sweden and Germany, and the translations into foreign languages, all of which helped bring many a quid into the author's coffers. No formal bibliography of Forester's works exists, though many are the collectors who would welcome one; a century after his birth, perhaps the time for one has come. All books displayed are drawn from the Georgetown collection of his works.
 

George M. Barringer