Here Lies H. G. Wells

Author H. G. Wells, who has spent most of his 76 years alternately digging up past history and building imaginary future Utopias, last week took a long and jaundiced look into his own future. As Sinclair Lewis did almost two years ago.* Wells published his auto-obituary:

"The name of H. G. Wells, who died yesterday afternoon of heart failure in the Paddington infirmary at the age of 97, will have few associations for the younger generation. ... He was indeed one of the most prolific of the 'literary hacks' of that time. . . . The most interesting thing about Wells was his refusal to accept the social inferiority to which he seemed to have been born. ... He was a liberal democrat in the sense that he claimed an unlimited right to think, criticize, discuss and suggest, and he was a socialist in his antagonism to personal, racial or national monopolization. . . . Wells was a copious and repetitive essayist upon public affairs and a still more copious writer of fiction. . . . The question whether he was to be considered a 'humorist' was discussed but never settled.

"He was seriously injured in a brawl with some Fascist roughs brought about by a rare fit of indignation on his part in 1948, and his health was further impaired by a spell in a concentration camp under the brief Communist dictatorship of 1952. Thereafter his once considerable vitality seems to have deserted him. . . . From being a premature, he became a forgotten man. His immediate needs were relieved by a small Civil-List pension in 1955.

"He occupied an old tumble-down house upon the borders of Regents Park and his bent, shabby, slovenly and, latterly, somewhat obese figure was frequently to be seen in the adjacent gardens. . . . 'Some day,' he would be heard to say, 'I shall write a book, a real book.' "

* Lewis wrote that he expected history's verdict would be that he was "the Last Surviving Connecticut Yankee."

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