Patrick O'Brian, 1914-2000, was an author known for his naval novels set during the Napoleonic Wars. O'Brian was born in London under the name Richard Patrick Russ. He published novels and stories under that name in the 1930s, including a collection of animal stories, Beasts Royal (1934), and a picaresque novel set in India, Hussein, An Entertainment (1938). During World War II, he worked as an ambulance driver and possibly for British intelligence. After the war, he took the name Patrick O'Brian and assumed an Irish identity; the connection between Patrick O'Brian and Richard Patrick Russ was broken in 1998 in the Daily Telegraph and in a biography by journalist Dean King. During the 1960s, O'Brian worked as a translator of French nonfiction, most notably translating the works of Simone de Beauvoir as well as Papillon (1970), the memoirs of French convict Henri Charrière. O'Brian is also the author of biographies of Pablo Picasso (1976) and Sir Joseph Banks (1987).

In 1967, O'Brian was approached by the American publishing house J.B. Lippincott. They had read his novelization of Commodore Anson's 1740 voyage to the pacific, The Golden Ocean (1956), and requested that he write another naval adventure for adults in the vein of C.S. Forester, who had died the previous year. The result, Master and Commander, published by Collins in 1969, was the first of his Napoleonic War novels about the adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey and surgeon Stephen Maturin. The series, which would eventually span 20 novels, enjoyed positive reviews when first published but only achieved popular success in the 1990s. In light of that success, O'Brian was appointed Commander of the British Empire in 1995.

In 1936, O'Brian, who was still going by Richard Patrick Russ, married (Sarah) Elizabeth Jones, 1911-1999. Their son Richard Russ was born in 1937. By 1939, Russ had begun an affair with Mary Wicksteed, 1915-1998, wife of Dimitry Mihailovich, Count Tolstoy Miloslavsky. That same year, Russ' and Elizabeth's daughter, Jane Russ, was born with spina bifida. In 1940, Russ left Elizabeth and their two children at their cottage in Suffolk to return to London to live with Mary. In 1942, Russ' daughter Jane died from complications of spina bifida, and Mary divorced her husband. Russ and Elizabeth divorced in 1945, and he married Mary two weeks later.