Picture of Dorian Gray and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d‘Urbervilles are published.

1893 Wells’s marriage is unhappy. He falls in love with a beautiful young student named Amy Catherine (“Jane”) Robbins. His first published book, Textbook of Biology, appears. He becomes a full-time writer, known for independence of mind and works that challenge conventional thinking.

1895 After Isabel and H.G. divorce, he marries Jane Robbins. His tireless supporter, she types all of his manuscripts and corre spondence. Wells publishes The Time Machine, which parodies the English class system and provides a distressing view of the future of human society. The Stolen Bacillus, a collection of short stories, and The Wonderful Visit, a science-fiction novel, also appear. In his lifetime, Wells will publish more than eighty books.

1896 Wells publishes The Island of Dr. Moreau, in which a mad sci entist turns animals into semihuman creatures, and The Wheels of Chance, about the bicycling craze.

1897 The Faust-like tale The Invisible Man appears. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is published.

1898 Wells publishes The War of the Worlds, about an invasion of Martians.

1900 In the first years of the century, Wells and Jane host numerous luminaries in their home and actively engage in various politi cal and intellectual debates. Wells publishes a comic novel of lower-middle-class life, Love and Mr. Lewisham, about a strug gling teacher.

1901 A son, George Philip Wells, is born to Jane and H.G. The First Men in the Moon, which predicts human travels into outer space, and Anticipations, in which Wells advances his ideas about social progress, are published. Queen Victoria dies.

1903 A second son, Francis Richard, is born. Mankind in the Making, another book promoting social progress, is published. Wells joins the socialist Fabian Society, but soon draws fire from

George Bernard Shaw and others for his deviations from the Fabian line. Throughout his life, Wells takes every opportunity to share and implement his dream of a utopian society.

1905 Wells publishes the somewhat autobiographical comic novel Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul, in which a man receives an unexpected inheritance. A Modern Utopia, again centered around Well’s ideas about social progress, also appears. George Bernard Shaw’s play Major Barbara is published.

1908 Wells resigns from the Fabian Society. He publishes The War in the Air, which foretells aerial combat.

1909 He publishes Tono-Bungay, a panoramic and critical picture of English society, and Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story, a fem inist novel.

1910 Wells publishes an ode to the past in the comic novel The History of Mr. Polly, in which a shopkeeper changes his life. E. M. Forster’s Howards End appears.

1911 In The New Machiavelli, Wells excoriates the Fabian Society and provides portraits of its notable members. His collection The Country of the Blind and Other Stories appears.

1914 World War I begins. Wells and the writer Rebecca West, with whom he has a long affair, have a son, Anthony. Wells travels to Russia for the first time. He publishes The World Set Free, which predicts the use of the atomic bomb in warfare.

1915 Boon, a novel that satirizes Henry James’s style, is published under the pen name Reginald Bliss; it provokes an acerbic exchange between the two authors. D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow is published.

1916 Wells travels to the war fronts of Italy, Germany, and France. He publishes Mr. Britling Sees It Through, a realistic portrayal of the English during the war. James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is published.

1918 Wells creates anti-German information for the Ministry of Pro paganda.

1919 He coauthors, with Viscount Edward Grey, The Idea of a League of Nations.

1920 In an effort to rally supporters to his progressive political agenda, Wells travels again to Russia to meet with Lenin. Russia

in the Shadows and his immensely popular The Outline of History are published. Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is published.

1922 A Short History of the World appears. T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland is published. James Joyce’s Ulysses is published in Paris.

1927 Jane Wells dies. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is published.

1928 Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall appears.

1929 Wells publishes The Common Sense of World Peace.

1929 1930 In collaboration with his son, G. P Wells, and biologist Julian Huxley (grandson of T.H. Huxley), he publishes a work on biology called The Science of Life.

1930 W. H. Auden’s Poems is published.

1933 Wells publishes the novel The Shape of Things to Come, the story of a world war that lasts three decades in which cities are destroyed by aerial bombs.

1934 Wells travels to Moscow to speak with Stalin and