Jerome K. Jerome

Jerome Klapka Jerome was born in Walsall on 2 May 1859, the youngest of four children. His father, a nonconformist lay preacher, owned a coal mine, and when it failed the family moved, eventually to east London. The exiled Hungarian general György Klapka was staying with the family when the boy was born, and Jerome later took Klapka as a middle name. When his father died in 1871, the thirteen-year-old left school to work as a railway clerk.

After three years as a touring actor, he worked as a schoolmaster, a packer and a solicitor's clerk while writing in his spare time. His humorous essays, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886), sold exceptionally well, and in 1888 he married Georgina. He later co-edited the magazine The Idler, publishing writers such as Mark Twain and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Three Men in a Boat (1889) grew out of a boating holiday up the Thames with two friends; the dog, Montmorency, was Jerome's invention. Reviewers found it colloquial and vulgar, but the public loved it and it sold in huge numbers, though unauthorised American editions earned him nothing. A sequel, Three Men on the Bummel, followed in 1900.

His semi-autobiographical novel Paul Kelver (1902) at last won praise from serious critics, and his play The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1908) was very popular with audiences. In the First World War, too old for the British army, he drove ambulances for the French army. He fell ill on a motoring tour and died in Northampton on 14 June 1927.

Sources: wikipedia.org