The Undying Fire. A Contemporary Novel

Dedicated to all schoolmasters and schoolmistresses and every teacher in the world, this re-interpretation of the Book of Job is one of the author’s finest discussion novels. Written in 1918, this is the story of Job Huss, the headmaster of a progressive school. It is saturated with the ideas of educational reform and of the teaching of world history as the basis for a common civilization and is one of his most ambitious dialogue narratives. Essentially it is a modernized parody of the book of Job, a prose poem which Wells greatly admired, though not particularly religious, as can be seen from his logical Science Fiction writing. In „The Undying Fire”, Wells give us an updated Book of Job, focusing on the tribulations of an actual descendant of the biblical Job. The various characters from the Biblical narrative are all there, in updated form.