Michael Coren presents his new biography of H. G. Wells as a myth-shattering study. He had started his researches “with nothing but affection and admiration for the self-made man of so many achievements,” but soon discovered such an unpleasant side to his subject’s character that the biography perforce became a revisionist one, seeking to prove that Wells was not on the side of the angels, as other biographers had assumed, but had exercised a pernicious influence on twentieth-century thought. One can only conclude that Coren knew shockingly little about his subject when he decided to write his biography, for Wells’s less savory characteristics—his proto-fascist Utopianism, his advocacy of eugenics, his anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism—are right there in his books for anyone to find, especially in Experiment in Autobiography, A Modern Utopia, Anticipations, and Men Like Gods.

Considering his revisionist agenda, Coren has given us remarkably little new material on Wells. Nothing one reads here is much of a surprise; most of it is already known to readers of other biographies of Wells, including the autobiography. But Coren has performed a valuable service in looking at Wells’s life and work from a new angle. A biography (albeit brief) of Wells from a hostile point of view, with plenty of ammunition at the author’s disposal, is quite a useful object. It should help us to gain perspective on this large and troubling figure.

Wells proclaimed himself a prophet, and the world, ever credulous, took