J M Barrie
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Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, OM (9 May 1860 – 19 June 1937), more commonly known as J. M. Barrie, was a Scottish novelist and dramatist. He is best remembered for creating Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up, whom he based on his friends, the Llewelyn Davies boys. He is also credited with popularising the name "Wendy", which was uncommon (especially for girls) in either Britain or America before he gave it to the heroine of Peter Pan. He was made a baronet in 1913; his baronetcy was not inherited.
Barrie became a journalist in Nottingham, then London, and turned to writing novels and subsequently plays. He set his first novels in his birthplace of Kirriemuir, which he referred to as "Thrums". Barrie often wrote dialogue in Scots. His Thrums novels were hugely successful: Auld Licht Idylls (1888), A Window in Thrums (1889)[1], and The Little Minister (1891). His two "Tommy" novels, Sentimental Tommy (1896) and Tommy and Grizel (1902), dealt with themes much more explicitly related to those that would appear in Peter Pan. The first appearance of Peter came in The Little White Bird (1901).
Barrie also wrote a number of works for the theatre, beginning with Ibsen's Ghost (1891), a parody of Henrik Ibsen's drama Ghosts, which had just been performed for the first time in England under the Independent Theatre Society, led by J. T. Grein. Barrie's play was first performed on May 31 at Toole's Theatre in London. Barrie seemed to appreciate Ibsen's merits; even William Archer, the translator of Ibsen's works into English, enjoyed the humour of the play and recommended it to others. Barrie also authored the flop, Jane Annie (1893), which he begged his friend Arthur Conan Doyle to revise and finish, when he suffered the first of his many nervous breakdowns. Notable successes included Quality Street (1901) and The Admirable Crichton (1902).
Barrie's most famous and enduring work, Peter Pan, had its first stage performance on 27 December 1904. In 1929 he specified that the copyright of the play should go to the nation's leading children's hospital, Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. The current status of the copyright is complex. Later plays included What Every Woman Knows (1908). His final play was The Boy David (1936), which dramatized 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.
Barrie, along with a number of other playwrights, was involved in the 1909 and 1911 attempts to challenge the censorship of the theatre by the Lord Chamberlain.
Barrie's most famous and best loved work is his play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, performed innumerable times since 1904, developed into a novel by Barrie, and adapted by others into feature films, musicals, and more. The story is the classic tale of the child that does not want to grow up. The Bloomsbury scenes show the societal constraints of Victorian middle-class domestic reality. Never-Land is free of these constraints, a world where sexuality and morality are 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 his understanding of the deeper social allegories at work in Peter Pan.
Barrie also had a long string of successes on the stage. Many of these works, including "The Admirable Crichton", 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.
Other than Peter Pan, Barrie's best known works are his early Thrums stories, Auld Licht Idylls (1888), A Window in Thrums (1889) and The Little Minister (1891). Literary criticism of these works has been unfavourable, tending to disparage these early writings 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 popular writer in the UK even before Peter Pan made him a household name.
Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._M._Barrie
