Books, Arts & Manners

The Invisible Man: The Life and Liberties of H. G. Wells, by Michael Coren (Atheneum, 226 pp., $22.50)

IN A NOVEL of the late 1960s, Saul Bellow evidently thought he could amplify his main character, Arthur Sammler, a writer and intellectual, by giving Sammler a personal connection to the late English writer and man-about-the-world Herbert George (H. G.) Wells. And so Sammler would be moved to recall what Wells had related to him about his conversations with Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler, and his observations on “world peace, atomic energy, . . . [and] the colonization of the planets.” Of Wells, Sammler would remark that “he was just a mass of intelligent views. He expressed as many as he could, and at all times. . . . He was like Voltaire, a graphomaniac.”

About the Author

Hadley Arkes

Hadley Arkes is the founder and director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding.

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The Invisible Man: The Life and Liberties of H. G. Wells, by Michael Coren (Atheneum, 226 pp., $22.50)

IN A NOVEL of the late 1960s, Saul Bellow evidently thought he could amplify his main character, Arthur Sammler, a writer and intellectual, by giving Sammler a personal connection to the late English writer and man-about-the-world Herbert George (H. G.) Wells. And so Sammler would be moved to recall what Wells had related to him about his conversations with Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler, and his observations on “world peace, atomic energy, . . . [and] the colonization of the planets.” Of Wells, Sammler would remark that “he was just a mass of intelligent views. He expressed as many as he could, and at all times. . . . He was like Voltaire, a graphomaniac.”