In the 1960s two of O'Brian's seafaring books for children, "The Golden Ocean" (1956) and "The Unknown Shore" (1959), caught the attention of a US publisher, J B Lippincott, who were seeking an author to follow in the footsteps of C S Forester, creator of the Hornblower series of novels. Forester had died in 1966 and a year later, at the age of 53, O'Brian started work on "Master and Commander". The novel was first published in the US by Lippincott in 1969.