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Rafael Sabatini

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Biographical Sketch of Rafael Sabatini

Jesi, a diminutive city of the Italian Marches, was the birthplace of Rafael Sabatini, and here he spent his early youth.  At Jesi there are medieval walls, and a sunny piazza, with its ancient cobblestone paved streets which once echoed to the armored knights and the iron music of their horses' hooves, still, to the imaginative ear, vibrate with the past.  The city is glamorous with those centuries he makes live again in his novels with all their violence and beauty.  If, from the first, history and legend had not thus been a vivid and visible thing to the child, it is doubtful if the man could have re-created the past with such fascinating reality.

 

The son of itinerant opera singers, he was born in Italy, and educated in Switzerland and Portugal.  As with Joseph Conrad, English is his adopted tongue as never attended an English school, receiving his practical knowledge of the English language from his mother, an Englishwoman.  He himself married a Lancashire lady, and for some years has been a British subject living in London.

 

He has rescued the historical novel from the literary dust-bin and wears with elegance and grace the inherited mantle of Dumas.  At the age of eighteen he spoke five languages with fluency.  He was influenced by the work of Mary Johnston, but does not greatly admire Sir Walter Scott.  While novel-writing is his favorite amusement, salmon fishing is his chief business in life.  Once upon a time he was a publisher by profession.  He had been struggling for twenty years before "Scaramouche" finally put him on the map.  He refers to the book as his Columbus; it discovered America for him.  His popularity is merely a by-product of his talent.  He plays tennis in summer and skis in winter.  His pages are bright with the flash of cutlass and rapier.  His chapters are alive with marching men and painted pirate ships.  He has never written an autobiographical novel of adolescence nor followed any passing fad or fancy.

 

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Last Revision February 18, 2008 03:33 PM