Patrick O'Brian

Patrick O'Brian (1914-2000) was a British novelist and translator best known for the Aubrey-Maturin series, twenty novels of Napoleonic-era naval fiction following Royal Navy captain Jack Aubrey and his close friend, the ship's surgeon and intelligence agent Stephen Maturin. Beginning with Master and Commander in 1969, the series is renowned for its historical precision -- O'Brian researched period seamanship, medicine, and naval bureaucracy exhaustively -- combined with a friendship at its center that many critics rank among the finest in English fiction.

O'Brian's own biography was famously obscured by his own hand: born Richard Patrick Russ in England, he reinvented much of his early life story, including claims of Irish ancestry, only for researchers to uncover the fuller, more ordinary truth after his death. Whatever the discrepancies in his personal history, his command of period detail and prose in the novels themselves is not in dispute, and the series is widely regarded as having elevated nautical fiction into serious literature.

A new reader should start with Master and Commander, which sets up Aubrey and Maturin's first meeting and the whole series' rhythm of shipboard action and shore-leave intrigue. The series reached a wide new audience through the 2003 film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, starring Russell Crowe as Aubrey, which drew on elements from several books in the series.