Laurence Sterne

Born on November 24, 1713, in Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ireland, Laurence Sterne was the son of Roger Sterne, an ensign in the British army, and Agnes Herbert. His childhood was itinerant, spent following his father's regiment across Ireland and England. He attended Jesus College, Cambridge, on a sizarship, a form of financial aid, and earned his bachelor's and master's degrees before being ordained as an Anglican priest in 1738. He served as Vicar of Sutton-on-the-Forest in Yorkshire, married Elizabeth Lumley in 1741, and spent nearly twenty quiet years in the church. Then, at age forty-six, everything changed. The first two volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman appeared in 1759 and made him an overnight celebrity. The novel was radically experimental, digressive to the point of delirium, full of blank pages, marbled pages, squiggly lines, and a plot that barely reaches its narrator's birth by the third volume. Nine volumes were published between 1759 and 1767. Tuberculosis had plagued Sterne since his Cambridge years, and in January 1762 he travelled to France seeking a warmer climate. Those journeys became the basis for A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), published just three weeks before his death. He died of pleurisy on March 18, 1768, in London, at fifty-four, leaving debts of eleven hundred pounds. His body was reportedly stolen by grave robbers and ended up on an anatomist's table at Cambridge before being recognized and returned, a grotesque postscript worthy of Tristram Shandy itself.

By the spring of 1760 the first volumes of Tristram Shandy had become the rage of London, and their author, a country parson of forty-six, arrived to find himself the most sought-after man in town. Reynolds painted him leaning on his own manuscript, future prime ministers sent invitations, and his lodgings, he wrote, stayed full from morning to night.