J.M. Barrie

Scottish · 1860 to 1937

Born James Matthew Barrie on May 9, 1860, in Kirriemuir, Angus, the ninth of ten children of a Calvinist handloom weaver and a household whose centre of gravity was his mother Margaret Ogilvy, he was six years old when his elder brother David, his mother's favourite, died in an ice-skating accident the day before his fourteenth birthday. James tried to fill the lost boy's place, wearing David's clothes and whistling in his manner, and his mother took comfort in the thought that a dead boy would never grow up. He grew to only five feet three and a half, a fact his 1934 passport recorded. After schooling at Glasgow Academy, Forfar, and Dumfries Academy, where his summer games of pirate in the Moat Brae garden seeded the play to come, he read literature at the University of Edinburgh, took his M.A. in 1882, worked for eighteen months on the Nottingham Journal, and began turning his mother's Kirriemuir stories into the Thrums books, Auld Licht Idylls (1888) and A Window in Thrums (1889). London brought him fame as a playwright. In Kensington Gardens he met the five Llewelyn Davies brothers, whom he later unofficially adopted on the deaths of their parents and to whom Peter Pan owes its existence. The play opened at the Duke of York's Theatre in December 1904; the novel Peter and Wendy followed in 1911. He was made a baronet by George V in 1913, received the Order of Merit in 1922, served as Chancellor of Edinburgh University, and bequeathed all rights in Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. He died of pneumonia in London on June 19, 1937, at the age of seventy-seven.