Rafael Sabatini was born April 29, 1875 in Jesi, Italy. At a young age, Rafael was exposed to many languages, and attending school in Portugal and, as a teenager, in Switzerland. By the time he was seventeen, when he went to England to live permanently, he could speak five languages. He quickly added English and chose to write in his adopted language, because, he said, "all the best stories are written in English." After a brief stint in the business world, Sabatini went to work as a writer. He wrote short stories in the 1890s, and his first novel came out in 1902. It took Sabatini almost a quarter of century before he attained success with Scaramouche in 1921. It became an international best-seller. Captain Blood followed in 1922 and was equally as successful. Sabatini was a prolific writer; he produced a new book approximately every year. While he would never achieve the success of Scaramouche and Captain Blood, Sabatini still maintained a great deal of popularity with the reading public through the decades that followed. By the 1940s, illness forced the writer to slow his prolific method of composition. However, he did write several additional works even during that time. His body of work consists of 31 novels, 8 short story colections and 6 books of poetry. He died February 13, 1950 in Switzerland. He is buried at Adelboden, Switzerland.
Author George MacDonald Fraser was born April 2, 1925 in Carlisle. He was refused entrance to the medical faculty of Glasgow University, so he joined the army in 1943. He served as an infantryman with the 17th Indian Division of the XIVth Army in Burma, a lance corporal and was commissioned in the Gordon Highlanders. After the war, he became a sports reporter with the Carlisle Journal; and during this time, he met and married Kathleen Hetherington, a reporter from another paper. He worked as a reporter and sub-editor on the Cumberland News and then moved to Glasgow, in 1953, where he worked at the Glasgow Herald as a features editor and deputy editor. Fraser's first novel was "Flashman" (1969), which was followed by nine sequels, so far, that deal with different venues of the 19th century ranging from Russia, Borneo and China to the Great Plains of the America West. Some of the other titles in the Flashman Papers are "Royal Flash" (1970), "Flashman in the Great Game" (1975), "Flashman and the Redskins" (1982), and "Flashman and the Angel of the Lord" (1994). Some of his non-fiction work includes "The Steel Bonnets" (1971), which is a factual study of the Anglo-Scottish border thieves in the seventeenth century, and "Quartered Safe Out Here" (1992). Fraser has also written a number of screenplays that include "The Three Musketeers" (1973), "Royal Flash" (1975), "Octopussy" (1983), and "Return of the Musketeers" (1989). He has also written a series of short stories about Private McAuslan whose titles include "The General Danced at Dawn" (1970), "McAuslan in the Rough" (1974), and "The Sheik and the Dustbin and other McAuslan Stories" (1988). He died of cancer on January 2, 2008.
