Nicholas Monsarrat

Nicholas Monsarrat (born March 22, 1910, Liverpool, Eng.—died Aug. 8, 1979, London) was a popular English novelist whose best-known work, The Cruel Sea, vividly captured life aboard a small ship in wartime.

Monsarrat took a bachelor’s degree in law at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then spent two years in a solicitor’s office. His first book, Think of Tomorrow, appeared in 1934, but he had not fully established his reputation when World War II broke out. From 1940 to 1946 he served with the Royal Navy, chiefly on the dangerous Atlantic convoy runs. He afterward put his experiences aboard ship to brilliant account, first in H.M. Corvette (1942) and then in The Cruel Sea (1951). The latter novel became a huge best-seller. His later work included The Story of Esther Costello (1953), The Tribe That Lost Its Head (1956), and Smith and Jones (1963), which was based on the 1951 Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean spy defection to the Soviet Union. Life is a Four-Letter Word (2nd ed., 1966, 1970; abridged as Breaking In, Breaking Out, 1971) is an autobiography to 1956. His last novel, The Master Mariner; Running Proud (1979), was the first book of a two-part novel to have covered the British Navy from 1588 to 1788.