Winning His Spurs: A Tale of the Crusades Paperback - 2011

George Alfred Henty (1832 -1902), was a prolific English novelist, special correspondent and imperialist. He is best known for his historical adventure stories that were popular in the late 19th century. His works include Out on the Pampas, The Young Buglers, With Clive in India and Wulf the Saxon. Shortly before resigning from the army as a captain in 1859 he married Elizabeth Finucane. The couple had four children. Elizabeth died in 1865 after a long illness and shortly after her death Henty began writing articles for the Standard newspaper. In 1866 the newspaper sent him as their Special Correspondent to report on the Austro-Italian War where he met Giuseppe Garibaldi. He went on to cover the 1868 British punitive expedition to Abyssinia, the Franco-Prussian War, the Ashanti War, the Carlist Rebellion in Spain and the Turco-Serbian War. He also witnessed the opening of the Suez Canal and travelled to Palestine, Russia and India. Henty once related in an interview how his storytelling skills grew out of tales told after dinner to his children. He wrote his first children's book, Out on the Pampas in 1868, naming the book's main characters after his children. The book was published by Griffith and Farran in November 1870 with a title page date of 1871. While most of the 122 books he wrote were for children, he also wrote adult novels, non-fiction such as The March to Magdala and Those Other Animals, short stories for the likes of The Boy's Own Paper and edited the Union Jack, a weekly boy's magazine. His children's novels typically revolved around a boy or young man living in troubled times. These ranged from the Punic War to more recent conflicts such as the Napoleonic Wars or the American Civil War. Henty's heroes - which occasionally included young ladies - are uniformly intelligent, courageous, honest and resourceful with plenty of 'pluck' yet are also modest. These virtues have made Henty's novels popular today among many Christians and homeschoolers. On 16 November 1902, Henty died aboard his yacht in Weymouth Harbour, Dorset shortly before he finished his last novel, By Conduct and Courage, which was completed by his son Captain C.G. Henty.