As he moved forward in life, HG Wells' work in science fiction dissipated and he began to identify himself as a journalist instead of a novelist, transitioning his work to depict the conditions of the lower middle class instead of fantastic visions of spider-like beings engaging the Earth in battle. His parents had been domestic servants until an inheritance allowed them to buy their own shop, but it was run poorly, with outdated stock and a bad location. His father made the majority of his income as a professional cricket player until a leg injury forced him into early retirement. With his family's income dwindling, Wells became a draper's apprentice, working 13 hour long shifts and sleeping in a dormitory. It was during this vocation that he devoted himself to the reading of the classics.
After his studies were finished he was poor once again, and began to write short humorous pieces to help him survive while living with his aunt. Many of these early pieces were published anonymously and are lost forever, though his success with these shorter pieces encouraged him to work on his first full-length novel, The Time Machine.
His memories of the drapery led to the later novels The Wheels of Chance; The History of Mr. Polly; and Kipps -- didactic, political pieces which critiqued English Society's distribution of wealth. He always had metaphor in mind but discovered that his metaphors were too easily misinterpreted. And so he lowered the veil and spoke directly to his readers about the danger and inequity of capitalism.
Wells visited Russia three times: 1914, 1920 and 1934. He met Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. In his book Russia in the Shadows, Wells portrayed Russia as recovering from a total social collapse: "the completest that has ever happened to any modern social organisation."
On 23 July 1934, after visiting U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wells went to the Soviet Union and interviewed Joseph Stalin for three hours for the New Statesman magazine, which was extremely rare at that time. He told Stalin how he had seen 'the happy faces of healthy people' in contrast with his previous visit to Moscow in 1920. However he also criticized the lawlessness, class discrimination, state violence, and absence of free expression. Stalin enjoyed the conversation and replied accordingly. As the chairman of the London-based PEN Club, which protected the rights of authors to write without being intimidated, Wells hoped by his trip to USSR he could win Stalin over by force of argument. Before he left, he realized that no reform was to happen in the near future.
Wells was friends with Winston Churchill and Churchill used The War of the Worlds section title, “The Gathering Storm” as the center in one of his most famous speeches, describing the rise of Nazi Germany.
Wells was also a Signatories of “The Authors' Declaration,” a manifesto decrying the German occupation of Belgium, which defended and sold England's declaration of war on Germany in 1914.
Wells's extensive writings on equality and human rights, most notably The Rights of Man (1940), laid the groundwork for the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations shortly after Wells' death.
In his last book Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945), Wells considered the idea that humanity being replaced by another species might not be such a bad idea after all.