Rafael Sabatini

Rafael Sabatini (29 April 1875 – 13 February 1950) was an Italian-born British writer of romance and adventure novels.

He is best known for his worldwide bestsellers: The Sea Hawk (1915), Scaramouche (1921), Captain Blood (a.k.a. Captain Blood: His Odyssey) (1922), and Bellarion the Fortunate (1926). Several of his novels have been made into films, both silent and sound.

In all, Sabatini produced 34 novels, eight short story collections, six non-fiction books, numerous uncollected short stories, and several plays.

Life as an author

After a brief stint in the business world, Sabatini went to work as a writer. His first published short story, "The Red Mask," was printed in 1898, and his first novel came out in 1902. It took Sabatini roughly a quarter of a century of hard work before he attained success in 1921 with Scaramouche. The novel, an historical romance set during the French Revolution, became an international bestseller. It was followed the next year by the equally successful Captain Blood. All of his earlier books were then rushed into reprints, the most popular of which was The Sea Hawk (originally published in 1915).

Sabatini was a frequent writer who published a new book approximately every year. With his high output and well-crafted stories he was able to maintain his popularity with the reading public through the decades that followed.

In the early 1940s illness from stomach cancer forced Sabatini to slow his prolific writing. He only published three more books before his death in 1950: King in Prussia (also known as The Birth of Mischief, 1944), Turbulent Tales (a collection of short stories, 1946), and The Gamester (1949).