Wells was born into a poor family of shopkeepers in Kent in 1866.  He left his teaching position when he was in his early thirties to write The Time Machine, which was published in 1895.  The huge success of this novel led him to follow his dreams of authorship as he continued to write science fiction novels with The Invisible Man, War of the Worlds, and The Island of Dr. Moreau.  In 1914, Wells fell in love with and married his idea of the perfect woman, an author by the name of Rebecca West.  As he got older, Wells began predicting the end of society and died at the age of 80, soon after the detonation of the first atomic bomb.