J. M. Barrie

James Matthew Barrie was born in Scotland on 9 May 1860, educated there, then moved to London and built a career writing novels and plays that succeeded on their own terms. He met the Llewelyn Davies boys, and they sparked something: first a baby with magical adventures in Kensington Gardens, tucked into his 1902 adult novel The Little White Bird, then the 1904 West End fairy play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up — an ageless boy, an ordinary girl named Wendy, a fantasy place called Neverland. The play popularized the name Wendy and overshadowed everything else he wrote. After the bo…