Over a career that spanned five decades, H. G. Wells produced nearly a hundred full-length books, a large portion of them novels and collections of short fiction. In his 1934 autobiography Wells accurately admitted that "much of my work has been slovenly, haggard, and irritated, much of it hurried and inadequately revised." But Wells possessed exceptional literary gifts, and several of his novels--including Kipps (1905), Tono-Bungay (1908), and The History of Mr. Polly (1910)--deserve to be ranked among the best of their time. Wells is widely regarded as the father of modern science fiction; The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898) employ strong elements of carefully paced suspense and amply illustrate Wells's remarkable ability to render convincingly the most bizarre and improbable characters and events. Indeed, many of Wells's earlier works reveal him working within a tradition of narrative fiction shaped in large part by, among others, Nathaniel Hawthorne...