Author
J. M. Barrie
1860-1937
J. M. Barrie was a Scottish-born novelist and playwright who created Peter Pan, the boy who would not grow up, and gave the rights to a London children's hospital.
Born Sir James Matthew Barrie.
James Matthew Barrie was born on 9 May 1860 in Kirriemuir, Angus, the ninth of ten children of David Barrie, a handloom weaver, and Margaret Ogilvy. When he was six his older brother David died in an ice-skating accident, and Barrie tried to comfort his grieving mother. She found comfort in the belief that David would remain a boy forever, an idea that became an important theme in Barrie's writing.
He studied literature at the University of Edinburgh and then worked as a journalist on the Nottingham Journal. Stories based on his mother's memories of her home town, which he called Thrums, led to his first novels, including A Window in Thrums (1889) and The Little Minister (1891), and made him a successful writer. He turned increasingly to the theatre and married the actress Mary Ansell in 1894.
In Kensington Gardens he befriended the young Llewelyn Davies boys and invented Peter Pan to entertain them. Peter first appeared in his 1902 novel The Little White Bird, and then in the play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, first staged in 1904, about an ageless boy and an ordinary girl named Wendy who have adventures in Neverland. In 1911 he turned the play into the novel Peter and Wendy. After the boys' parents died, Barrie unofficially adopted them.
He was made a baronet in 1913, and in 1929 gave the copyright of the Peter Pan works to Great Ormond Street Hospital. He died in London on 19 June 1937.
Sources: wikipedia.org
