O'Brian, Patrick

orig. Richard Patrick Russ

born Dec. 12, 1914, near London, Eng.

died Jan. 2, 2000, Dublin, Ire.

British writer.

He was the eighth of nine children; an early marriage ended in divorce, and after World War II he married again, changed his name, and moved to a small, secluded coastal town in France near the Spanish border. He received little critical notice until age 54, when he began publishing his 18th-century seafaring series featuring Capt. Jack Aubrey and ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin; it eventually numbered 20 books (1969–99) and was compared with the works of Herman Melville, Anthony Trollope, and Marcel Proust.

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▪ 2001

Richard Patrick Russ 

      British novelist and biographer (b. Dec. 12, 1914, near London, Eng.—d. Jan. 2, 2000, Dublin, Ire.), wrote a highly acclaimed series of historical novels on the Napoleonic-era British Royal Navy as well as biographies of Pablo Picasso and 18th-century naturalist Sir Joseph Banks. Between 1969 and 1998 he published 20 novels set during the Napoleonic Wars and featuring Jack Aubrey, a British naval officer, and Stephen Maturin, an Irish-Catalan physician and Aubrey's friend. The series made O'Brian a literary celebrity. A reclusive man who purposely distorted his personal history (for years he claimed to be Irish and Catholic), he was unmasked by journalists in 1998 as the son of an English mother and a physician of German-Jewish descent. Since 1949 he had lived mostly in the village of Collioure in southwestern France. Aside from the Aubrey-Maturin books, he published several literary novels, including Three Bear Witness (1952). Pablo Ruiz Picasso: A Biography appeared in 1976 and Joseph Banks, a Life in 1987. O'Brian was made CBE in 1995.

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