C. S. Forester

Cecil Scott Forester, an Englishman, was born in Cairo in 1899, the son of a British army officer. He was educated in London, and for a time he studied medicine. After a World War I stint in the infantry, however, he decided to be a poet. This was a shortlived pursuit and he soon turned to biography and fiction. He then wrote many best-selling novels—African Queen and The General among them—before he wrote the first of his Hornblower stories in …