Jerome K. Jerome

Jerome Klapka Jerome was an English humorist, novelist, and playwright, born on May 2, 1859, in Caldmore, Walsall, Staffordshire, and died on June 14, 1927, in Northampton. The youngest of four children of an unsuccessful nonconformist preacher and ironmonger, he was raised in poverty in the East End of London after the family's businesses failed, and his middle name Klapka honored the Hungarian general György Klapka, a family friend in exile.

Orphaned by fourteen, Jerome left school to work as a railway clerk, then drifted through positions as schoolteacher, packer, and journalist, and spent three years as a struggling actor with traveling theater companies. His first book, On the Stage — and Off (1885), drew on those years. The comic essay collection Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow followed in 1886.

He achieved lasting fame with Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), published by J. W. Arrowsmith of Bristol in August 1889, an account of a two-week Thames rowing holiday taken with his friends George Wingrave and Carl Hentschel and his fox terrier Montmorency. The book has remained continuously in print since publication, has been translated into more than thirty languages, and inspired a sequel, Three Men on the Bummel (1900), about a cycling tour of the Black Forest.

Jerome co-founded the magazine The Idler with Robert Barr in 1892 and edited the weekly To-Day. His play The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1908) was a commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic. He volunteered as an ambulance driver for the French army in 1916 at age fifty-seven.

The name Jerome derives from the Greek Hierōnymos, meaning "sacred name," most famously borne by St. Jerome, the fourth-century translator of the Vulgate Bible. He carried it as a man whose comic prose became part of the English canon.