(1875-1950)
Inarguably one of the greatest of all historical novelists, Rafael Sabatini brought the distant past most excitingly alive in topic after topic for half a century. His purview was vast, ranging across centuries and continents, up and down the corridors of power in assorted empires, on battlefields, aboard pirate galleons, and inside royal boudoirs. His novels and story collections combined a lively scholarship and intimate knowledge of history’s most colorful personages and events with florid yet compellingly readable prose, a style that was elaborate and antique and yet brisk and contemporary in effect.
The child of two opera singers (and later well-known vocal coaches), an Italian father and English mother, Rafael was raised in artistic, cosmopolitan circles all over Europe. Spending time in Italy, France, and Portugal with his parents, as well as sojourns in Liverpool, England, with his grandmother and years in Swiss academies, Sabatini grew up well educated, a linguist, a sophisticate. Apparently lacking his parents’ vocal abilities, he became a businessman and translator for several years. But the artistic gene eventually made itself apparent in Rafael, who began writing stories in his spare time and published his first novel, The Lovers of Yvonne, in 1902. He wrote for more than a decade before his literary reputation was made with the publication in 1915 of The Sea Hawk, a tale of piracy and slavery and heroic derring-do on the Arabian coast. It was a popular novel and sold to the movies. Sabatini had an even greater success with Scaramouche, his 1921 novel set at the time of the French Revolution. A tale of love, death, and revenge with a dashing, impudent hero, it was one of the most popular topics of the 1920s and it, too, was brought to the silent screen by Hollywood.
In 1922 Sabatini released the greatest of his pirate stories, Captain Blood. It was the swashbuckling history of Peter Blood, an Irish doctor with a sea-roving past who is arrested for treating the wounds of a British traitor and packed off to a West Indian slave mart. He escapes in a fierce revolt, commandeers a ship, and turns buccaneer. As Captain Blood the good doctor becomes a fierce legend of the danger-soaked Spanish Main. Sabatini chronicled his adventures with vigor and elan, dazzling the reader with the images of full-masted galleons on turquoise Caribbean seas, gleaming cutlasses, blinding white sand beaches, lustrous pieces of eight. In America, the saga of Captain Blood was related in installments in the pages of the leading pulp magazine, Adventure. Sabatini’s most popular character, Captain Blood would star in numerous short stories in the years ahead, all of which were eventually repub-lished in several collections. Though Captain Blood is widely considered the greatest pirate novel of the 20th century, another later swashbuckler of pirates on the Caribbean, The Black Swan (1932), is nearly as good.
In addition to his novels and short story collections, Sabatini wrote many nonfiction works, including popular histories and biographies of Italian Renaissance figure Cesare Borgia and Torque-mada, notorious in the Spanish Inquisition.
Works
- Anthony Wilding (1910), also published as The Arms and the Maid;
- Banner of the Bull: Episodes in the Career of Ce-sare Borgia (1915);
- Bardelys the Magnificent (1906);
- Bel-larion the Fortunate (1926);
- Black Swan, The (1932);
- Captain Blood (1922);
- Captain Blood Returns (1931);
- Carolinian, The (1925);
- Chivalry (1935);
- Columbus (1942);
- Fortune’s Fool (1923);
- Fortunes of Captain Blood, The (1936);
- Gamester, The (1949);
- Gates of Doom, The (1914);
- Heroic Lives (1934);
- Hounds of God, The (1928);
- Justice of the Duke, The (1912);
- King in Prussia (1944);
- Life of Cesare Borgia (1911);
- Lion’s Skin, The (1911);
- Lost King, The (1937);
- Love at Arms (1907);
- Lovers of Yvonne, The (1902);
- Marquis of Carabas, The (1940);
- Minion, The (1930);
- Mistress Wilding (1924);
- Nuptials of Corbal, The (1927);
- Reaping, The (1929);
- Romantic Prince, The (1929);
- Scaramouche (1921);
- Sea Hawk, The (1915);
- Shame of Molly, The (1908);
- Snare, The (1915);
- Stalking Horse, The (1933);
- St. Martin’s Summer (1909);
- Strolling Saint, The (1913);
- Sword of Islam, The (1939);
- Tavern Knight, The (1904);
- Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition (1913);
- Trampling of the Lilies (1906);
- Turbulent Tales (1946);
- Venetian Masque (1934)
