The final Horatio Hornblower story tells of Napoleon's plans to invade England ... Set in 1805, Hornblower and the Crisis finds Horatio Hornblower in possession of confidential dispatches from Bonaparte after a vicious hand-to-hand encounter with a French brig. The admiralty rewards Hornblower by sending him on a dangerous espionage mission that will light the powder trail leading to the battle of Trafalgar ... Hornblower and the Crisis was unfinished at the time of Forester's death, but the author left notes – included here – telling us how the tale would end. Also included are two further stories – Hornblower and the Widow McCool and The Last Encounter – that tell of Hornblower as a very young and very old man, respectively. This is the final book chronicling the adventures of C. S. Forester's inimitable nautical hero, Horatio Hornblower.
Cecil Scott Forester, an Englishman, was born in Cairo in 1899, the son of a British army officer. He was educated in London, and for a time he studied medicine. After a World War I stint in the infantry, however, he decided to be a poet. This was a shortlived pursuit and he soon turned to biography and fiction. He then wrote many best-selling novels—African Queen and The General among them—before he wrote the first of his Hornblower stories in 1937. That first book was Beat to Quarters, chronologically the fifth volume in tracing the career of Hornblower. In 1940 Forester moved to Berkeley, California, where he lived for many years between his World War II and postwar travels. In April of 1966, while writing Hornblower and the Crisis, C. S. Forester died. Today, the popularity of his writing still continues to grow, and the names of both Forester and Hornblower have become synonymous with the greatest names in naval literature.
