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Peter Pan by J M Barrie (1860-1937) About the author  James
Matthew Barrie was born in the Lowland village of Kirriemuir, in Forfashire,
Scotland. His father, David Barrie was a handloom weaver, and mother,
Margaret Ogilvy, the daughter of a stonemason. They had ten children,
Barrie was the ninth.Barrie studied at Dumfries Academy at the University of Edinburgh, receiving his M.A. in 1882. He worked as a journalist for the Nottingham Journal and moved to London as a freelance writer in 1885. Barrie knew such great figures of literature as G.B. Shaw and H.G. Wells and could surprise them with his remarks. Once he said to Wells: "It is all very well to be able to write books, but can you waggle your ears?" When a friend noticed that he ordered Brussels sprouts every day, he explained: "I cannot resists ordering them. The words are so lovely to say." In 1888 Barrie gained his first fame with Auld Licht Idylls, sketches of Scottish life. His melodramatic novel, The Little Minister (1891), became a huge success, and was filmed later three times. After its dramatization Barrie wrote mostly for the theatre. In 1884 he married Mary Ansell, who had appeared in his play Walker, London. The Little Minister was a popular stage production in 1897 both in England and in the Unites States, where Barrie began his collaboration with the impresario Charles Frohman and his star Maude Adams. Two of Barrie's best plays, Quality Street, about two sisters who start a school "for genteel children", and The Admirable Crichton, in which a butler saves a family after a shipwreck, were produced in London in 1902, and also later filmed. In the same year Peter Pan appeared by name in Barrie's adult novel The Little White Bird. It was a first-person narrative about a wealthy bachelor clubman's attachment to a little boy, David. Taking this boy for walks in Kensington Gardens, the narrator tells him of Peter Pan, who can be found in the Gardens at night. Peter Pan was produced for the stage in 1904 but the play had to wait several years for a definitive printed version and it did not appear as as a narrative story until 1911. The book was titled Peter and Wendy. Peter Pan evolved gradually from the stories that Barrie told to Sylvia Llewelyn Davies's five young sons. She was the daughter of the novelist George du Maurier, and a motherly figure, with whom Barrie formed a long friendship. In 1909 Mary Barrie began an affair with the writer Gilbert Cannan and Barrie's marriage ended. When Sylvia Llwelyn Davies and her husband died, Barrie was the unofficial guardian of their sons. Barrie wrote two more fantasy plays. Dear Brutus (1917) described a group of people who enter a magic wood where they are transformed into the people they might have become had they made different choices. Mary Rose (1920) was a story of a mother, who is searching for her lost child. Eventually she becomes a ghost. What Every Woman Knows (1908) portrayed a determined woman, Maggie, whose husband eventually realizes that he owes his success to her. In 1913 Barrie became a baronet and in 1922 he received the Order of Merit. He was elected lord rector of St. Andrew's University and in 1930 chancellor of Edinburgh University. Barrie died on June 3, 1937. You can read individual chapters here:
or download the whole book to read off-line:
Other Books of the Month in English:  The
100 Greatest Books of the 20th Century65 Quotations
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