Rafael Sabatini

Rafael Sabatini (29 April 1875 – 13 February 1950) was an Italian/English writer of novels of romance and adventure. He is best known for his worldwide bestsellers: The Sea Hawk (1915), a tale of an Elizabethan Englishman among the pirates of the Barbary Coast Scaramouche (1921), a tale of the French Revolution in which a fugitive hides out in a commedia dell'arte troupe and later becomes a fencing master (Sabatini wrote a sequel ten years later: Scaramouche the Kingmaker (1931)) Captain Blood (a.k.a. The Odyssey of Captain Blood) (1922), in which the title character is admiral of a fleet of pirate ships. (Sabatini wrote two additional Captain Blood books comprising short stories, but they are not sequels: The Chronicles of Captain Blood (a.k.a. Captain Blood Returns) (1931), and The Fortunes of Captain Blood (1936)) Bellarion the Fortunate (1926), about a cunning young man who finds himself immersed in the politics of fifteenth-century Italy In all, Sabatini produced 31 novels, eight short story collections, six non-fiction books, numerous uncollected short stories, and several plays. 2Biography Rafael Sabatini was born in Iesi, Italy, to an English mother (Anna Trafford) and Italian father. His parents were opera singers who became teachers. At a young age, Rafael was exposed to many languages, living with his grandfather in England, attending school in Portugal, and, as a teenager, in Switzerland. By the time he was 17, when he returned to England to live permanently, he had mastered five languages. He quickly added a sixth language – English – to his linguistic collectio