William Makepeace Thackeray

William Makepeace Thackeray was born on July 18, 1811, in Calcutta, India. He was the only child of Richmond Thackeray, a senior official of the British East India Company, and Anne Becher, the daughter of another senior company official. He received an excellent education at the renowned Charterhouse School and Trinity College, Cambridge, but it was abruptly interrupted when young William lost part of his inheritance, amounting to the staggering sum of twenty thousand pounds, through gambling. In the early 1830s, he traveled to Germany and met Goethe, while he spent the next three years attempting to earn a law degree, eventually ending up in Paris, where he studied drawing and painting. He returned to London in 1837, married to a poor Irishwoman with whom he had three daughters, and immediately began working as a journalist. He wrote prolifically for the most well-known magazines and major newspapers of the time. His early writings in Punch magazine, which caught the public's attention, satirized English snobbery and later formed the famous "The Book of Snobs." In 1840, Mrs. Thackeray suffered a nervous breakdown from which she never recovered, although she outlived her husband. William was forced to send the children to France, to his mother, from where they returned in 1846 to live with him thereafter. His first novel, "Catherine," although written for Fraser's Magazine and published in serial form, was anything but "popular reading." It violated the narrative conventions of his time and treated its characters as real people, without glossing over the immorality that characterized them. In the following years, he wrote the anti-heroic novel "Barry Lyndon" and the legendary "Vanity Fair," fully showcasing his narrative talent and penetrating critical perspective. Thackeray died suddenly on Christmas Eve in 1863, leaving behind some of the most significant works of European literature.