Jerome K Jerome,Born 1859
AUTHOR OF ‘THREE MEN IN A BOAT’
Jerome Klapka Jerome was a writer best known for the comic travelogue Three Men in a Boat (1889). He was the son of Marguerite Jones and Jerome Clapp, an ironmonger and lay preacher who dabbled in architecture. The family fell into poverty owing to bad investments in the local mining industry, and debt collectors visited often, an experience that Jerome described in his autobiography My Life and Times (1926), which is archived here as his life story. He wanted to go into politics or be a writer, but the death of his father when Jerome was 13 and of his mother when he was 15 forced him to abandon his studies and find work. He was employed at the London and North Western Railway, initially collecting coal that fell along the railway, and he remained there for four years. Over the next few years, he worked as an actor, a school teacher, a packer, and a solicitor's clerk. In 1888 he married Georgina Marris, They honeymooned in a boat on the Thames. Jerome sat down to write Three Men in a Boat as soon as they returned from their honeymoon. Its popularity was such that the number of registered Thames boats went up fifty percent in the year following its publication. In its first twenty years alone, the book sold over a million copies worldwide.
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