Author
Oliver Goldsmith
1728-1774
An Anglo-Irish poet, novelist and playwright who worked as a hack writer in 18th-century London and wrote The Vicar of Wakefield and She Stoops to Conquer.
Oliver Goldsmith's date and place of birth are not known for certain. He told a biographer he was born on 10 November 1728, and he was born in Ireland, either in County Longford, where his father was an Anglican curate, or at his grandparents' house in County Roscommon. When he was two, his father became a rector in County Westmeath and the family moved to Lissoy. At Trinity College Dublin he neglected his studies and fell to the bottom of his class, though he graduated in 1749.
After trying several professions, he studied medicine at Edinburgh and walked through Flanders, France, Switzerland and northern Italy, busking with his flute. He settled in London in 1756 and wrote a great deal for the publishers of Grub Street. The Citizen of the World, a series of letters supposedly by a Chinese traveller in England, begun in 1760, brought him fame. He became a close friend of Samuel Johnson, but he was always in debt.
His only novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), is narrated by Dr Charles Primrose, a devout and kindly vicar whose family falls on hard times. His poem The Deserted Village followed in 1770. She Stoops to Conquer, first performed in 1773, is a comedy of love, mistaken identity and social etiquette that is still regularly performed. Both the novel and the play are on this site.
Goldsmith died on 4 April 1774 and was buried in Temple Church, London. Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley all mention his characters in their own novels.
Sources: wikipedia.org
