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(born Dec. 12, 1914, near London, Eng. — died Jan. 2, 2000, Dublin, Ire.) British writer. He was the eighth of nine children; an early marriage ended in divorce, and after World War II he married again, changed his name, and moved to a small, secluded coastal town in France near the Spanish border. He received little critical notice until age 54, when he began publishing his 18th-century seafaring series featuring Capt. Jack Aubrey and ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin; it eventually numbered 20 books (1969 – 99) and was compared with the works of Herman Melville, Anthony Trollope, and Marcel Proust.

For more information on Patrick O'Brian, visit Britannica.com.

 
 
Irish Literature Companion: Patrick O'Brian

O'Brian, Patrick (1914-2000), novelist; born in London as Richard Patrick Russ into a medical family, he later assumed the identity of a Gaelic-speaking Irishman, cloaking his education and training in deliberate obscurity. His novels suggest a military or naval intelligence career. The Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin series of sea-novels, set during the period of the Napoleonic wars, began with Master and Commander (1970), and include Post Captain (1972), H.M.S. Surprise (1973), Desolation Island (1979), The Reverse of the Medal (1986), Clarissa Oakes (1992) and The Wine-Dark Sea (1993). He wrote a biography of Picasso (1976), and short stories in The Chian Wine (1974) and other collections.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: O'Brian, Patrick,
1914–2000, British novelist, b. near London as Richard Patrick Russ. He changed his name in 1945 and after World War II settled in France. O'Brian's first novel, Caesar (1930), written when he was a teenager, was followed during the 1950s and 60s by several rather well-received novels, e.g., Testimonies (1952), and a book of short stories. In 1969 he published Master and Commander, the first novel of the celebrated Aubrey-Maturin series. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, these tales of the sea and men at war ultimately included 20 novels, ending with Blue at the Mizzen (1999). They follow the Royal Navy's Capt. Jack Aubrey and his Irish-Catalan friend Stephen Maturin, a doctor, naturalist, and spy, in their daily lives and adventures in Lord Nelson's navy. These stirring, fast-paced, witty, allusive, and psychologically insightful works are meticulous in their treatment of military matters, nautical lore, natural history, and other details. By the 1980s O'Brian was a British literary cult figure, sometimes compared to England's greatest novelists. Not published in the United States until the 1990s, his books soon achieved a huge readership there. O'Brian also wrote such nonfiction works as a study of life in the early 19th-century English navy (1974) and biographies of Picasso (1976) and Joseph Banks (1986) and was a talented translator. Two of O'Brian's novels formed the basis of a film, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), directed by Peter Weir.

Bibliography

See biography by D. Kean (2000); studies by A. E. Cunningham, ed. (1994), D. Kean (1995 and 1996), A. G. Brown (1999), and B. Lavery (2003).

 
Wikipedia: Patrick O'Brian
Patrick O'Brian
Born December 12 1914(1914--)
Chalfont St. Peter, Buckinghamshire
Died 2 January 2000 (aged 85)
Dublin, Ireland
Occupation novelist and translator

Patrick O'Brian, CBE (12 December 19142 January 2000; born as Richard Patrick Russ) was an English novelist and translator, best known for his Aubrey–Maturin series of novels set in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars and centered on the friendship of English Naval Captain Jack Aubrey and the Irish–Catalan physician Stephen Maturin. The 20-novel series is known for its well-researched and highly detailed portrayal of early 19th century life, as well as its authentic and evocative language. A partially-finished twenty-first novel in the series was published posthumously containing facing pages of handwriting and typescript.

Biography

The widely held belief that O'Brian was born in Ireland began to unravel in 1998 when British journalists uncovered that O'Brian was in fact born in Chalfont St. Peter, Buckinghamshire and that he was the son of a physician of German descent and an English mother of Irish descent. Dean King's life of O'Brian, Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed, documents the complex personality and life of this enigmatic man of letters. From 1949 to his death, he lived at Collioure, a Catalan town in southern France, where he was buried.

Historian Nikolai Tolstoy is O'Brian's stepson through O'Brian's marriage to Mary Tolstoy, who divorced Count Dmitri Tolstoy and in July 1945 married O'Brian. In November 2004, Nikolai Tolstoy published Patrick O'Brian: The Making of the Novelist, the first volume in a two-part biography of O'Brian using material from the Russ and Tolstoy families and sources including O'Brian's personal papers and library, which Tolstoy inherited on O'Brian's death.

Literary career

O'Brian published two novels, a collection of stories and several uncollected stories under his original name, Richard Patrick Russ. His first book was written at the age of 12 (and published three years later in 1930); "Hussein" was published in 1938, when he was 23. Richard Patrick Russ legally changed his name to Patrick O'Brian in August 1945. This was a bold stroke in many ways, not least because O'Brian necessarily had to abandon the reputation for quality writing he had already built up under the name Russ.

In the 1950s O'Brian wrote three books aimed at a younger age-group, The Road to Samarcand, The Golden Ocean, and The Unknown Shore, the latter two were based on events of the Anson circumnavigation of 1740–1743. Although written many years before the Aubrey–Maturin series, the literary antecedents of Aubrey and Maturin can be clearly seen in the characters of Jack Byron and Tobias Barrow.

Aubrey-Maturin series

Main article: Aubrey-Maturin series

Beginning in 1970, O'Brian began writing what turned into the twenty volume Aubrey-Maturin series of novels. The books are set in the early 19th century and describe the life and careers of Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend, the ship's surgeon Dr Stephen Maturin. The books are distinguished by O'Brian's deliberate use and adaption of actual historical events, either by placing his heroes in the action without changing the outcome or using less well known events in his plots. The books are considered by critics to be a roman fleuve which can be read as one long story; the books follow Aubrey and Maturin's professional and domestic lives continuously.

Other works

As well as his historical novels, O'Brian wrote three adult mainstream novels, six story collections, and a history of the Royal Navy aimed at young readers. He also was a respected translator, responsible for more than 30 translations from the French, including Henri Charrière's Papillon into English, Jean Lacouture's biography of Charles de Gaulle, as well as many of Simone de Beauvoir's later works.

O'Brian also wrote detailed biographies of Sir Joseph Banks (an English naturalist who took part in Cook's first voyage) and Pablo Picasso. His biography of Picasso is a massive and comprehensive study of the artist. Picasso lived for a time in Collioure, the same French village as O'Brian, and the two came to be acquainted there.

Peter Weir's 2003 film, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is loosely based on the novel The Far Side of the World from the Aubrey–Maturin series for its plot, but draws on a number of the novels for incidents within the film.

Mary's love and support were critical to O'Brian throughout his career. She worked with him in the British Library in the 1940s as he collected source material for his anthology "A Book of Voyages", which became the first book to bear his new name--the book was among his favorites, because of this close collaboration. He claimed that he wrote "like a Christian, with ink and quill"; Mary was his first reader and typed his manuscripts "pretty" for the publisher. Her death in March of 1998 was a tremendous blow to O'Brian and in the last two years of his life, particularly once the purported details of his early life were revealed to the world, he was a "lonely, tortured, and at the last possibly paranoid figure." (Tolstoy 2004; xi).

Trivia

In 2003 a previously nondescript species of Costa Rican palm weevil was described and named Daisya obriani after Patrick O'Brian by Dr Robert S. Anderson of the Canadian Museum of Nature.

Original manuscripts

O'Brian wrote all of his books and stories by hand, shunning both typewriter and word processor. The handwritten manuscripts for 18 of the Aubrey-Maturin novels have been acquired by the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Only two--"The Letter of Marque" and "Blue at the Mizzen" remain in private hands. The O'Brian manuscript collection at the Lilly Library also includes the manuscripts for "Picasso" and "Joseph Banks" and detailed notes for six of the Aubrey/Maturin novels.

Nikolai Tolstoy also possesses an extensive collection of O'Brian manuscript material, including the second half of "Hussein", several short stories, much of the reportedly "lost" book on Bestiaries, letters, diaries, journals, notes, poems, book reviews, and several unpublished short stories (Tolstoy, various pages).

Biographies

Since his death, there have been two biographies published, though the first was well advanced when he died. The second is the first volume of a planned two volume biography by O'Brian's stepson.

  • Dean H. King (2001). Patrick O'Brian - A life revealed. Hodder & Stoughton Ltd. ISBN 0-340-79256-6. 
  • Dean H. King (2001). In Search of Patrick O'Brian. Holt (Henry) & Co ,U.S.. ISBN 0-8050-5977-6.  (US edition of the above book)
  • Nikolai Tolstoy (2004). Patrick O'Brian: The Making of the Novelist. Century. ISBN 0-7126-7025-4. 
  • Nikolai Tolstoy (2005). Patrick O'Brian: The Making of the Novelist 1914-1949. W W Norton & Co Ltd. ISBN 0-393-06130-2.  (US edition of the above book)

Also of importance when studying O'Brian:

  • A. E. Cunningham (Editor) (1994). Patrick O'Brian: Critical appreciations and a bibliography. British Library. ISBN 0-7123-1071-1. 

Bibliography

The Aubrey–Maturin series

Fiction (non-serial)

Short story collections

  • Beasts Royal (1934)
  • The Last Pool and Other Stories (1950)
  • The Walker and Other Stories (1955)
  • Lying in the Sun and Other Stories (1956)
  • The Chian Wine and Other Stories (1974)
  • Collected Short Stories (1994; The Rendezvous and Other Stories in the U.S.)

Non-fiction

  • Men-of-War: Life in Nelson's Navy (1974). ISBN 0-393-03858-0
  • Picasso (1976; originally titled Pablo Ruiz Picasso). ISBN 0-00-717357-1
  • Joseph Banks: A Life (1987) The Harvill Press, London. Paperback reprint, 1989. ISBN 1-86046-406-8

See also

External links


 
 

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Irish Literature Companion. The Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature. Copyright © 1996, 2000, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
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