War of the Worlds

Peter J. Beck is Emeritus Professor of International History at the University of Kingston, UK. His previous publications include Presenting History: Past and Present (2012).

This history of a classic novel, traced from the first inspiration through to twenty-first-century adaptations, is also an engaging portrait of the young Wells in the crucial year he spent at Woking: the year he drafted the book, established his literary career, founded modern science fiction – and, given the impact of Wells’s work, the year that changed history. Accessible, authoritative and engaging: this is an unmissable traveller’s guide to the World of H.G. Wells’s War.

• List of Tables List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Preface List of Abbreviations Herbert George Wells: chronology H.G. Wells: Books published, 1895-1900 Map: H.G. Wells and The War of the Worlds Part I: Introduction 1. H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds: an enduring present-day story 2. Wells’s powerful sense of place 3. Wells’s strong sense of time: contextualising The Warof the Worlds Part II: Writing and publishing The War of the Worlds 4.Wells’s personal setting 5. Struggling for recognition as a new writer 6. Wells’s ‘literary factory’ in Woking 7. Writing The War of the Worlds 8. The War of the Worlds: storyline and methodology 9. Leaving Woking for Worcester Park Part III: Taking Wells’s The War of the Worlds to the world in anever-expanding range of multimedia adaptations 10. The War of the Worlds’s multimedia afterlife 11. Wells’s Martians invade Boston and New York: serialisingThe War of the Worlds in American newspapers, 1897-98 12. Wells’s Martians invade the USA yet again: Orson Welles’1938 War of the Worlds broadcast 13. ‘Those Men from Mars’ invade the Americas and Europe againand again after 1938: the power of radio drama 14. The War of the Worlds reaches cinema and television screensaround the world: the Hollywood films of 1953 and 2005 15. The War of the Worlds inspires Jeff Wayne’s rock opera andreaches the music stage around the world Part IV: The War of the Worlds’s Literary Heritage 16. The War of the Worlds’s literary heritage Part V: Conclusion 17. Conclusion Bibliography Index