Books: The Days of the Prophet

H.G. WELLS by NORMAN and JEANNE MACKENZIE 487 pages. Simon & Schuster. $10.

H.G. Wells continues to be a biographer's dream and a book reviewer's waltz. His life stretched very nearly from Appomattox to Hiroshima. He was one of the world's great storytellers, the father of modern science fiction, an autobiographic novelist of scandalous proportion, a proselytizer for world peace through brain power, an unsurpassed popular historian, a journalist and inexhaustible pamphleteer, the friend and worthy adversary of great men and the lover of numerous beautiful and intelligent women.

But when he died in 1946 at the age of 79, Wells' reputation had...