J.M. Barrie, creator of the beloved children’s character Peter Pan, was not only a literary master, but also a philanthropist. Barrie, a Scotsman, wrote a few different stories that featured the boy who never grew up. The first was a story called “Peter Pan and the Kensington Gardens” that was included in his book The Little White Bird, published in 1902. This tells the story of Peter’s birth and subsequent runaway status. Next, Barrie wrote the stage play Peter Pan or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up in 1904.

Finally, in 1911 Barrie released Peter and Wendy, which was later re-titled as Peter Pan. This book became an instant classic and both the book and the play have inspired countless stage and screen adaptations since their release. The characters in all the Peter Pan works are based on a real life family, the Llewelyn-Davies, whom Barrie met and befriended. He later adopted the orphaned Davies boys and raised them himself.

In 1924, Barrie wished to contribute to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London and designated that the entire copyright for Peter Pan be transferred to the hospital. The children’s hospital has a distinguished 150-year history and with control over the rights to the work it received any royalties produced by its use and adaptation.

The copyright expired fifty years after Barrie’s death in 1937, but the United Kingdom granted the hospital a perpetual right to collect royalties on Peter Pan. However, the United States copyright is in dispute today under public domain law.

In December of 1926, thirty six year old Agatha Christie disappeared. This was exactly the stuff of her own mysteries. The successful author and playwright had abandoned her car near a chalk pit and police suspected suicide. Her mother had recently passed away and her husband had confessed to cheating on Christie with another woman. As police searched, they carefully inspected the nearby bottomless lake, The Silent Pool, for any evidence of Christie’s body. In addition, they searched a nearby hut, but they came away empty handed. Eleven days passed before Christie was found. In the meantime, the press was in a frenzy trying to establish motive and theory as to where the mystery writer had gone. She was the featured character in a suspense story of her own. A few days after her disappearance, items of female clothing were found in the hut near the lake and a letter was sent to her brother stating that she had gone on holiday. Finally, a headwaiter in a Yorkshire hotel recognized Christie and reported the siting to police. She had been staying there under the assumed name Teresa Neele, which was the same last name as her husband’s mistress. The official account to the press was that Christie had suffered an attack of amnesia after the car crash. However, after her death in 1976 it was made clear that her disappearance was all a planned foil for her husband’s illicit weekend with his mistress. The sales of Christie’s books skyrocketed after her return.

Louisa May Alcott, author of the famous Little Women among other books, was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1832. Alcott’s style of writing was new for her time, as she created female characters that were full of depth and warmth, but also full of opinions. The women in Alcott’s books were independent minded, especially for their times. Jo, the heroine of Little Women, actually pursues a writing career, something that was highly unusual for a woman of Alcott’s time.

But most people do not know that Alcott did not just write about forward thinking women. She was one herself. In fact, she was a suffragette. As women in the United States fought for the right to vote, Alcott joined in the crusade. Then in 1879, while she was living in Concord, New Hampshire, she registered to vote and was the first woman ever registered to vote in that city. She voted in the subsequent school election.

Most people are familiar with the Anne of Green Gables series of books, but they are less familiar with the author of the books, Lucy Maud Montgomery. Montgomery was born in Clifton, Prince Edward Island in 1874. She set the Anne series in this same location. Anne is a young orphan girl who is adopted by an older couple. The couple originally asks the adoption agency for a boy to help around the homestead, and when Anne arrives by train, they try to send her back. But something about the red headed girl makes them keep her and she grows up with the couple, eventually becoming a loved and valued member of the family and community.

What most people do not realize is that Montgomery wrote these books as a semi autobiographical account of her own life. You may be familiar with Laura Ingles Wilder and her Little House on the Prairie series of biographical accounts, but Montgomery’s circumstances were more tragic. When Lucy was only two years old, her mother died. Her father soon met and married another woman. When he did so, he abandoned the child to her maternal grandmother so that he could start a new family with his new wife and leave any reminders of his old life behind. Just as Lucy grew up an orphan on Prince Edward Island, so she created the character of Anne to mirror her experiences.

O. Henry is best known for his surprise endings and stunning plot twists. The prolific short story writer is best known for the stories The Gift of the Magi and The Ransom of Red Chief. O. Henry was born William Sydney Porter in Greenboro, North Carolina in 1862. He loved to read but dropped out of school early to work. He moved to Houston and worked on a Texas ranch, and in 1882 he married. While working at the Houston Post, Porter was accused of embezzling funds from the paper and in 1897 he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison.
What most people do not realize about O. Henry is that this is where most of his work was born. Porter began writing in prison and after serving three of the five years, was released in 1901. His first story appeared in McClure’s Magazine in 1899. It was when he was released from prison that he changed his name to O. Henry and began to make a living as one of the best-loved short story writers of all time.

Jack London is famous for his breathtaking novels and short stories that detail the overwhelming power of nature. Some of his most popular include The Call of the Wild and White Fang. Most of his works are centered on man’s struggle to survive. Born in 1876 in San Francisco, California, London was abandoned by his father and raised by his mother and stepfather. They suffered extreme poverty and London dropped out of school at age 14 to work as a seaman. He moved from place to place, unemployed and living like a hobo on freight trains. He protested with other groups of the unemployed, adopting socialist views. In 1894, he was arrested for vagrancy and jailed.

London’s inspiration for his survival novels is clearly taken from his own difficult life. But what most people do not realize is that London is largely self-taught. He lacked the high school education required for college admittance, but he taught himself using books from public libraries where he spend most of his time. At the age of 19, he was admitted to the University of California at Berkeley and began to earn his living as a writer.

His prolific career included numerous novels and short stories, an unsuccessful run on the Socialist ticket for Oakland mayor, and two marriages. In his later years, he suffered from illness and alcoholism and mysteriously resigned from the Socialist party. However, there are speculations that London committed suicide with morphine instead of dying from natural causes.

James Joyce is best known for his laborious but critically acclaimed novel Ulysses. He was also the author of other novels and short stories, most of which centered on life in Ireland. A particularly popular collection of stories is entitled The Dubliners. Joyce was born in 1882 in Dublin to an extremely devout Irish Catholic family. His mother ensured that Joyce was educated in a Roman Catholic school run by the Jesuits. His upbringing was strict and his childhood was plagued by poverty, as his father was a failed businessman. However, the family maintained a middle class façade, greatly concerned with social mores and appearances.

When Joyce graduated from University College in Dublin, he began to publish essays and travel. In 1902 he went to Paris and worked as a journalist and teacher, never to much financial success. After a year in France, he returned home to his ill mother. She died shortly after his return and Joyce’s life was never the same. After the loss of this strong Catholic influence, the young man lived a life of complete opposites to the one he was raised to live.

In 1904, he met Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid in Dublin. They traveled together to France. What most people do not realize is that there is a nearly thirty-year span of time between the meeting of Joyce and Nora and their marriage. He traveled with her, spending time with her as her lover very openly. They paid no attention to the mores of the time and lived quite in disregard to any fundamentally Catholic ideals. In 1931, they finally married.

After censorship troubles in Great Britain and the United States, Ulysses was first published in France in 1922. It was not made available in the English speaking countries until 1933. He and Nora spent a great deal of time living in Zurich, however it was in France that he worked on his second great work, Finnegans Wake. At the time, glaucoma had robbed him of much of his eyesight, and yet he continued to write. The book was published in 1939 to a poor reception. Joyce died in Zurich in 1941 after the fall of France in World War II.