J. M. Barrie

James Matthew Barrie was born in 1860 in Kirriemuir, Scotland, the ninth of ten children in a weaver's family. The death of his older brother David in a skating accident when Barrie was six profoundly shaped his imagination; his mother's grief and her idealization of the boy who would never grow up became a central preoccupation of his work. Barrie studied at the University of Edinburgh and became a successful novelist and playwright in London, but his greatest creation emerged from stories he told to the Llewelyn Davies boys, five brothers he befriended in Kensington Gardens. Peter Pan first appeared as a character in Barrie's 1902 novel The Little White Bird before becoming the hero of the 1904 play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, and the 1911 novel Peter and Wendy. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by Peter and Wendy.