August 13, 1946

H. G. Wells (September 21, 1866 to August 13,  1946) wrote his greatest fiction in his twenties and thirties. His career documents an astonishing creativity. He was possibly criticized for a midlife didactic turn by Chesterton. I cannot document the quote that Chesterton said Wells had sold his artistic birthright for a "pot of message." A discussion of the origins of the phrase is in an essay by the Quote Investigator. If Chesterton actually used the phrase, "a pot of message, it was not an original quip. Wells was haunted at the end by the accuracy of his own predictions.

The War of the Worlds (1898) is rarely praised for the right reasons. What is displayed in this classic is an anthropology of an intellectual type of person, when this kind of man is facing ruin. Our quote comes from this work of fiction.

To set the stage:

...[A]cross the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

In the ensuing apocalyptic events, Wells' hero makes his way through the wake of the Martians' success.

All this time I saw no human beings, and no signs of the Martians. I encountered a couple of hungry-looking dogs, but both hurried circuitously away from the advances I made them. Near Roehampton I had seen two human skeletons—not bodies, but skeletons, picked clean—and in the wood by me I found the crushed and scattered bones of several cats and rabbits and the skull of a sheep. But though I gnawed parts of these in my mouth, there was nothing to be got from them.

Well, you can finish reading it here. The novel is unsurpassed in the genre of science fiction.

H. G. Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature numerous times.