THE MAN IN THE YELLOW RAFT: Triumph of the Boon; The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck; Dr Blanke's First Command; Counterpunch; USS Cornucopia; December 6th; Rendezvous (by the author of the Hornblower Saga) [Import] [Paperback]

C. S. Forester (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Pan Books; First Thus edition (1971)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0330027425
• ISBN-13: 978-0330027427
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,927,202 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

C. S. Forester (1899-1966) wrote several novels with military and naval themes, including The African Queen, The Barbary Pirates, The General, The Good Shepherd, The Gun, The Last Nine Days of the "Bismarck," and Rifleman Dodd. But Forester is best known as the creator of Horatio Hornblower, a British naval genius of the Napoleonic era, whose exploits and adventures on the high seas Forester chronicled in a series of eleven acclaimed historical novels. Over the years Hornblower has proved to be one of the most beloved and enduring fictional heroes in English literature, his popularity rivaled only by Sherlock Holmes.

Born Cecil Louis Troughton Smith in Cairo, Egypt, Forester grew up in London. At the start of World War II he traveled on behalf of the British government to America, where he produced propaganda encouraging the United States to remain on Britain's side. After the War, Forester remained in America and made Berkeley, California, his home.

The character of Horatio Hornblower was born after Forester was called to Hollywood to write a pirate film. While the script was being drafted, another studio released Captain Blood, starring Errol Flynn, based on the same historical incidents about which Forester was writing. Rather than seek another movie project, and to avoid an impending paternity suit, Forester jumped aboard a freighter bound for England. By the end of the voyage he had outlined Beat to the Quarters, which introduced the now legendary character Hornblower, Bush, and Lady Barbara.

Forester died in 1966 while working on Hornblower During the Crisis.

Back Bay's editions of the Hornblower novels are numbered according to the chronology of Hornblower's life and career, not according to the sequence in which they were written. The series is comprised of the following titles:


Mr. Midshipman Hornblower
Lieutenant Hornblower
Hornblower and the Hotspur
Hornblower During the Crisis
Hornblower and the Atropos
Beat to Quarters
Ship of the Line
Flying Colours
Commodore Hornblower
Lord Hornblower
Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars excellent stories about the US Navy in the Pacific War, December 13, 2005

By 

Nicholas Dujmovic (Vienna, Virginia) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Man in the Yellow Raft (Mass Market Paperback)

This year my literary project was to read all of CS Forester's books on the sea and naval warfare. Of his fiction, and I include his celebrated Hornblower series, this collection of stories ranks near the top in conveying the sense of man at sea and at war. These are terrific stories, and together with the collection in Gold from Crete (of which see my review), the reader is guaranteed entertainment and insight.

What is remarkable is that CS Forester near the end of his life, and after four decades living in the United States, finally got it right in writing about Americans. After some inept or flawed portraits of Americans as naval warriors (The Captain from Connecticut, 1941; The Good Shepherd, 1956), Forester in 1960-61 managed to write a series of stories about the USS Boon, a destroyer in the Pacific War. Forester's pitch is near perfect, with few distracting anachronisms or mistakes (though I still find it hard to believe that lookouts in WWII announced a contact sighting with 'Sail ho.')

In addition to the Boon stories, this collection includes three that were published during the war, and they have that same poignancy that characterized Forester's other stories from that period, as published in Gold from Crete.

These stories are highly recommended for the lover of naval literature.