“Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain” was the subtitle H. G. Wells gave to his voluminous Experiment in Autobiography, and having got off to an unbearably modest start, he went on to confess that much of his literary output had been “slovenly, haggard and irritated,” as well as “hurried and inadequately revised.” Of the “gray matter of that organized mass of phosphorized fat and connective tissue” which he identified as the “hero” of his autobiography, he noted that its thinking was “slack” and “easily fatigued.” By way of summary, he hypothesized that “If there were brain-shows, as there are cat and dog shows, I doubt if it would get even a third class prize.”

If modesty is a rare trait among world-famous authors, rarer still is the ability—which Wells possessed in abundance—to analyze perceptively one’s own literary shortcomings. The critic who sorts through Wells’s prodigious oeuvre (he had published more than one hundred books before his death in 1946 at the age of seventy-nine) must be struck by how often Wells identified, and hence partially disarmed, whatever objections might be made against him. His fiction, he warned us, depended on “conventional types and symbols”; his “psychologically unsubtle” novels could be “artless self-revelatory stuff”; and as a stylist he “did not worry much about finish.”

Protestations of this sort seemed excessive or insincere to a number of critics when Experiment in Autobiographywas published in 1934, but Wells clung stoutly to his assertions of mediocrity.