Cecil Scott Forester is the pen name of Cecil Smith (August 27 1899 - April 2, 1966), an English novelist who rose to fame sustaining tales of risky venture by owning military themes, notably a 11-book Horatio Hornblower series about naval warfare in a period of the Napoleonic era, and The African Queen (1935; filmed in 1951 by John Huston).

Natural around Cairo, Forester had the complicated early life, including notional parents & the secret marriage. In the period of World War II he moved to a United States where he wrote propaganda to help develop that united states to enter the war on the Allied side, & yet settled within Berkeley, California. He married Kathleen Belcher, got ii sons, & divorced inside 1945. A firstborn boy, John Forester is the noted cycling activist & wrote a life of his father. He secretly married Dorothy Foster around 1947.

the popularity of the Hornblower series, built in the area of a central character world health organization was heroic but not as well heroic, has continued to develop across period. These are peradventure rivalled exclusively per lot late Aubrey–Maturin series of seafaring novels by Patrick O'Brian. Interestingly, each Hornblower & Aubrey come depending inside section on the historical figure, Admiral Lord Dundonald of Great Britain (known as Lord Cochrane in a cycle of a period whenever the novels come placed). Brian Perett has written the book A Real Hornblower: The Life & Days of Admiral Sir James Gordon, GCB, ISBN 1557509689, presenting the outbreak for a different inspiration.

A original conception of the popular American television series Star Trek was based around big measure on the Hornblower books, & was pitched per se to NBC television by creator Gene Roddenberry.

Forester likewise experienced a life outside the Hornblower series, writing several more novels, among the babies The African Queen (1935) and The General (1936); Peninsular War novels in Death to the French and The Gun; detective novels like Payment Deferred (1926) and Plain Murder (1930); and seagoing stories that did non require Hornblower, like Brown on Resolution (1929), The Ship (1943) and Sink the Bismarck! (1959). Many of his works were filmed, virtually all notably a 1951 film The African Queen directed by John Huston. Forester is when well credited as story writer for many picture non according to his promulgated fiction, including Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942).