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From Wikipedia:
Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, OM (9 May 1860 – 19 June 1937) was a Scottish author and dramatist, best remembered today as the creator of Peter Pan. The child of a family of small-town weavers, he was educated in Scotland. He moved to London, where he developed a career as a novelist and playwright. There he met the Llewelyn Davies boys who inspired him in writing about a baby boy who has magical adventures in Kensington Gardens (included in The Little White Bird), then to write Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, a "fairy play" about this ageless boy and an ordinary girl named Wendy who have adventures in the fantasy setting of Neverland. This play quickly overshadowed his previous work and although he continued to write successfully, it became his best-known work, credited with popularising the name Wendy, which was very uncommon previously.[1] Barrie unofficially adopted the Davies boys following the deaths of their parents.
Barrie was made a baronet by George V in 1913, and a member of the Order of Merit in 1922. Before his death, he gave the rights to the Peter Pan works to London's Great Ormond Street Hospital, which continues to benefit from them.
Barrie wished to follow a career as an author, but was dissuaded by his family, who wished him to have a profession such as the ministry, telling him that it was what David would have done, had he been alive. With advice from Alec, he was able to work out a compromise: he was to attend a university, but would study literature.[6] He enrolled at the University of Edinburgh, where he wrote drama reviews for the Edinburgh Evening Courant. He was extremely introverted, and was shy about the fact he was at university and only approximately five feet tall. He would go on to graduate with his M.A. on 21 April 1882.[6]
He worked for a year and a half as a staff journalist on the Nottingham Journal following a job advertisement found by his sister in The Scotsman,[6] then returned to Kirriemuir, using his mother's stories about the town (which he renamed "Thrums") for a piece submitted to the newspaper St. James's Gazette in London. The editor 'liked that Scotch thing',[3] so Barrie wrote a series of them, which served as the basis for his first novels: Auld Licht Idylls (1888), A Window in Thrums (1890),[7] and The Little Minister (1891). The stories depicted the "Auld Lichts", a strict religious sect that his grandfather had once belonged to.[6] Literary criticism of these early works has been unfavourable, tending to disparage them as sentimental and nostalgic depictions of a parochial Scotland far from the realities of the industrialised nineteenth century, but they were popular enough to establish Barrie as a successful writer. After the success of the "Auld Lichts", he printed Better Dead (1888) privately and at his own expense, and it failed to sell.[6] His two "Tommy" novels, Sentimental Tommy (1896) and Tommy and Grizel (1900), were about a boy and young man who clings to childish fantasy, with an unhappy ending.
Meanwhile, Barrie's attention turned increasingly to works for the theatre, beginning with a biography of Richard Savage and written by both Barrie and H.B. Marriott Watson (performed only once, and critically panned).[6] He immediately followed this with Ibsen's Ghost (or Toole Up-to-Date)[6] (1891), a parody of Henrik Ibsen's dramas Hedda Gabler and Ghosts (unlicensed in the UK until 1914,[8] it had created a sensation at the time from a single 'club' performance). The production of Barrie's play at Toole's Theatre in London was seen by William Archer, the translator of Ibsen's works into English, who enjoyed the humour of the play and recommended it to others. His third play, Walker, London (1892), helped him be introduced to a young actress named Mary Ansell. Although he was unsure about his own suitability for marriage, he proposed to her and they were married on 9 July 1894. Barrie bought her a Saint Bernard puppy, who would play a part in the novel The Little White Bird (or Adventures in Kensington Gardens). He also gave Ansell's given name to many characters in his novels.[6]
Barrie also authored Jane Annie, a failed comic opera for Richard D'Oyly Carte (1893), which he begged his friend Arthur Conan Doyle to revise and finish for him. In 1901 and 1902 he had back-to-back successes: Quality Street, about a responsible 'old maid' who poses as her own flirtatious niece to win the attention of a former suitor returned from the war; and The Admirable Crichton, a critically acclaimed social commentary with elaborate staging, about an aristocratic household shipwrecked on a desert island, in which the butler naturally rises to leadership over his lord and ladies for the duration of their time away from civilisation.
Peter Pan first appeared in his novel The Little White Bird, published in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton in 1902, and serialised in the US.[when?] Barrie's more famous and enduring work, Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, had its first stage performance on 27 December 1904. This play introduced audiences to the name Wendy, which was inspired by a young girl, Margaret Henley, who called Barrie 'Friendy'; she could not pronounce her Rs very well and so it came out as 'Fwendy'. It has been performed innumerable times since then, and was developed by Barrie into the 1911 novel Peter and Wendy. It has since been adapted into feature films, musicals, and more. The Bloomsbury scenes show the societal constraints of late Victorian and Edwardian middle-class domestic reality, contrasted with Neverland, a world where morality is ambivalent. George Bernard Shaw's description of the play as "ostensibly a holiday entertainment for children but really a play for grown-up people", suggests deeper social allegories at work in Peter Pan.
In April 1929 Barrie gave the copyright of the Peter Pan works to Great Ormond Street Hospital, a leading children's hospital in London. The current status of the copyright is somewhat complex.
Barrie had a long string of successes on the stage after Peter Pan, many of which discuss social concerns. The Twelve Pound Look shows a wife divorcing a peer and gaining an independent income. Other plays, such as Mary Rose and a subplot in Dear Brutus revisit the image of the ageless child. Later plays included What Every Woman Knows (1908). His final play was The Boy David (1936), which dramatised the Biblical story of King Saul and the young David. Like the role of Peter Pan, that of David was played by a woman, Elisabeth Bergner, for whom Barrie wrote the play.