The Door in the Wall

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) was one of the most popular British writers of all time. Prolific in many genres, he wrote more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories. His non-fiction output included works of social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire and biography. Wells is now best remembered for his Science Fiction novels and has been called the “Father of Science Fiction”. In addition to his fame as a writer, he was prominent in his lifetime as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. A futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons and satellite television. His Science Fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering.

The Door in the Wall is one of Wells’ most popular and widely studied short stories. It’s about the conflict between our private and the public world of responsibility, science, and rationalism in which we are compelled to live; A conflict between the world of the imagination versus the world of action.