WJean Antoine René Édouard Corbière was a French sailor, shipowner, journalist and writer, considered to be the father of the French maritime novel. He was the father of poet Tristan Corbière.
WJoseph Allan Elphinstone Dunn, best known as J. Allan Dunn, was one of the high-producing writers of the American pulp magazines. He published well over a thousand stories, novels, and serials from 1914–41. He first made a name for himself in Adventure. At the request of Adventure editor Arthur Sullivant Hoffman, Dunn wrote Barehanded Castaways, a novel about people trapped on a desert island which was intended to avoid the usual cliches of such stories. Barehanded Castaways was serialised in 1921 and was well received by Adventure's readers. Well over half of his output appeared in Street & Smith pulps, including People's, Complete Story Magazine, and Wild West Weekly. Dunn wrote over a thousand stories. He wrote approximately 470 stories for Wild West Weekly alone. His main genres were adventure and western; although he did write a number of detective stories, most of them appearing in Detective Fiction Weekly and Dime Detective. Dunn wrote The Treasure of Atlantis, a science fiction story about survivals from Atlantis living in the Brazilian jungle. The Treasure of Atlantis was published in All-Around Magazine in 1916 and later reprinted in 1970. He was a specialist in South Sea stories, and pirate stories. He also published a lot of juvenile fiction; including many stories for Boys' Life, primarily in the 1920s. A number of his novel-length stories were reprinted in hardbound, some under the pen name "Joseph Montague" for Street & Smith's Chelsea House imprint; many of his books were issued in the United Kingdom. His stories were frequently syndicated in newspapers, both in America and around the world, making him, for a time, a very widely known author.
WGeorge Manville Fenn was a prolific English novelist, journalist, editor and educationalist. Many of his novels were written for young adults. His final book was a biography of his fellow writer for juveniles, George Alfred Henty.
WCecil Louis Troughton Smith, known by his pen name Cecil Scott "C. S." Forester, was an English novelist known for writing tales of naval warfare, such as the 10-book Horatio Hornblower series depicting a Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic wars. The Hornblower novels A Ship of the Line and Flying Colours were jointly awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1938. His other works include The African Queen and The Good Shepherd.
WCaptain Frederick Marryat was a Royal Navy officer, a novelist, and an acquaintance of Charles Dickens. He is noted today as an early pioneer of nautical fiction, particularly for his semi-autobiographical novel Mr Midshipman Easy (1836). He is remembered also for his children's novel The Children of the New Forest (1847), and for a widely used system of maritime flag signalling known as Marryat's Code.
WFerenc Máté grew up in Budapest. He escaped Hungary with his mother after the crushing of the 1956 revolution by Soviet tanks. He graduated from the University of British Columbia, and worked on a railroad extra-gang, on tugboats, and as boat-builder, then became photographer, book editor, and writer. He has lived in Vancouver, Laguna Beach, Whistler Mountain, New York City, Paris, and Rome, and now resides on a wine estate in Tuscany with his wife, painter and winemaker Candace Máté, and their son, Peter.
WEllis Kirby Meacham was an American attorney and judge who wrote three Napoleonic era nautical adventures, for which he was awarded the Friends of American Writers Major Award in Fiction in 1969. During World War II, he attained the rank of commander of the United States Navy Reserve. He raised his grandson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Jon Meacham, during a part of his childhood.
WJames L. Nelson is an American historical nautical novelist.
WPatrick O'Brian, CBE, born Richard Patrick Russ, was an English novelist and translator, best known for his Aubrey–Maturin series of sea novels set in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, and centred on the friendship of the English naval captain Jack Aubrey and the Irish–Catalan physician Stephen Maturin. The 20-novel series, the first of which is Master and Commander, is known for its well-researched and highly detailed portrayal of early 19th-century life, as well as its authentic and evocative language. A partially finished 21st novel in the series was published posthumously containing facing pages of handwriting and typescript.
WCyril Northcote Parkinson was a British naval historian and author of some 60 books, the most famous of which was his best-seller Parkinson's Law (1957), in which Parkinson advanced Parkinson's law, stating that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion", an insight which led him to be regarded as an important scholar in public administration and management.
WRafael Sabatini was an Italian-English writer of romance and adventure novels.
WEmilio Salgari was an Italian writer of action adventure swashbucklers and a pioneer of science fiction.
WJulian Stockwin is an author of historical action-adventure fiction. As well as the Kydd Series he has written two standalone novels The Silk Tree and The Powder of Death.
WLeonard Patrick O'Connor Wibberley, who also published under the name Patrick O'Connor, among others, was a prolific and versatile Irish author who spent most of his life in the United States. Wibberley, who published more than 100 books, is perhaps best known for five satirical novels about an imaginary country Grand Fenwick, particularly The Mouse That Roared (1955).
WWalter Jon Williams is an American writer, primarily of science fiction. Previously he wrote nautical adventure fiction under the name Jon Williams, in particular, a series of historical novels set during the age of sail, Privateers and Gentlemen (1981–1984).