Patrick O'Brian, CBE (12 December 1914 - 2 January 2000), born Richard Patrick Russ, was an English novelist and translator, best known for his Aubrey-Maturin series of sea novels set in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, and centred on the friendship of the English naval captain Jack Aubrey and the Irish-Catalan physician Stephen Maturin. The 20-novel series, the first of which is Master and Commander, is known for its well-researched and highly detailed portrayal of early 19th-century life, as well as its authentic and evocative language. A partially finished 21st novel in the series was published posthumously containing facing pages of handwriting and typescript. O'Brian wrote a number of other novels and short stories, most of which were published before he achieved success with the Aubrey-Maturin series.

O'Brian was born Richard Patrick Russ, in Chalfont St. Peter, Buckinghamshire, to Charles Russ, an English physician of German descent, and Jessie Russ (nee Goddard), an English woman of Irish descent. The eighth of nine children, O'Brian lost his mother at the age of four, and his biographers describe a fairly isolated childhood, limited by poverty, with sporadic schooling and long intervals at home with his father and stepmother Zoe Center in Lewes, East Sussex. His literary career began in his childhood with the publishing of his earliest works, including several short stories, the book "Hussein, An Entertainment", and the short story collection Beasts Royal; the latter two brought him considerable critical praise especially considering his youth. He published his first novel at age 15, Caesar: The Life Story of a Panda Leopard, with help from his father.  In 1934, he underwent a brief period of pilot training with the Royal Air Force, but this was not successful, and he left the RAF. Prior to that, his application to the Royal Navy had been rejected on health grounds. In 1935, he was living in London, where he married his first wife, Elizabeth Jones, in 1936. They had two children. The second was a daughter who suffered from spina bifida; she died in 1942, aged three, in a country village in Sussex. When the child died, O'Brian had already returned to London, where he worked throughout the war.  The details of his work during the Second World War are murky. He worked as an ambulance driver, and he stated that he worked in intelligence. Dean King has claimed that O'Brian was actively involved in intelligence work and perhaps special operations overseas during the war. Indeed, despite his usual extreme reticence about his past, O'Brian wrote in an essay, "Black, Choleric and Married?", included in the book Patrick O'Brian: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography (1994) that: "Some time after the blitz had died away I joined one of those intelligence organisations that flourished during the War, perpetually changing their initials and competing with one another. Our work had to do with France, and more than that I shall not say, since disclosing methods and stratagems that have deceived the enemy once and that may deceive him again seems to me foolish. After the war we retired to Wales (I say we because my wife and I had driven ambulances and served in intelligence together) where we lived for a while in a high Welsh-speaking valley..." which confirms in first person the intelligence connection, as well as introducing his wife Mary Wicksteed Tolstoy as a co-worker and fellow intelligence operative. Nikolai Tolstoy, stepson through O'Brian's marriage to Mary Tolstoy, disputes this account, confirming only that O'Brian worked as a volunteer ambulance driver during the Blitz. Doing this work, he met Mary, the separated wife of Russian-born nobleman and lawyer Count Dimitri Tolstoy. They lived together through the latter part of the war and, after both were divorced from their previous spouses, they married in July 1945. The following month he changed his name by deed poll to Patrick O'Brian.

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