Jan de Hartog (April 22, 1914 – September 22, 2002) was a Dutch playwright, novelist and occasional social critic who moved to the United States in the early 1960s and became a Quaker.

[2] At 16, he attended the Kweekschool voor de Zeevaart in Amsterdam, a training college for the Dutch merchant marine.

Stella was made into a movie called The Key, starring Sophia Loren, Trevor Howard, and William Holden.

Remaining in the United Kingdom, de Hartog began writing his books in English, beginning with The Lost Sea (1951), which was a fictional account of his experiences working aboard ship.

[6] Columbia Pictures made The Fourposter into a partially animated movie, starring Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer.

[6] While de Hartog was lecturing at the University of Houston on playwriting,[7] he and his wife volunteered at Jefferson Davis County Hospital.

Despite national success, some of Houston's citizens reacted to the book with hostility, forcing de Hartog and his wife to return to Europe.

Before starting work on the second in the Martinus series, de Hartog wrote of the experience of adopting his two daughters, who were Korean War orphans, in The Children, which appeared in 1969.

He wrote a fictionalized account of the origin of the Religious Society of Friends, The Peaceable Kingdom: An American Saga, in 1972.

[10] He published the next book in the Martinus series, The Commodore, in 1986 while he was living in The Walled Garden in East Coker, Somerset, England, and it was followed by The Centurion (1989), which explored an interest in which he and his wife had become involved, dowsing.