Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, OM (/ˈbæri/; 9 May 1860 – 19 June 1937) was a Scottish novelist and playwright, best remembered as the creator of Peter Pan.

[3] Before his death, he gave the rights to the Peter Pan works to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London, which continues to benefit from them.

[6] When James Barrie was six years old, his elder brother David (their mother's favourite) died in an ice-skating accident on the day before his 14th birthday.

"I thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to", wrote Barrie in his biographical account of his mother Margaret Ogilvy (1896) "and I said in a little lonely voice, 'No, it's no' him, it's just me.'"

Barrie's mother found comfort in the fact that her dead son would remain a boy forever, never to grow up and leave her.

[8] Eventually, Barrie and his mother entertained each other with stories of her brief childhood and books such as Robinson Crusoe, works by fellow Scotsman Walter Scott, and The Pilgrim's Progress.

[9] At the age of eight, Barrie was sent to the Glasgow Academy in the care of his eldest siblings, Alexander and Mary Ann, who taught at the school.

He became a voracious reader and was fond of penny dreadfuls and the works of Robert Michael Ballantyne and James Fenimore Cooper.

[10][11] They formed a drama club, producing his first play Bandelero the Bandit, which provoked a minor controversy following a scathing moral denunciation from a clergyman on the school's governing board.

[12] Following a job advertisement found by his sister in The Scotsman, he worked for a year and a half as a staff journalist on the Nottingham Journal.

[12] Back in Kirriemuir, he submitted a piece to the St. James's Gazette, a London newspaper, using his mother's stories about the town where she grew up (renamed "Thrums").

[14] Modern literary criticism of these early works has been unfavourable, tending to disparage them as sentimental and nostalgic depictions of a parochial Scotland, far from the realities of the industrialised 19th century, seen as characteristic of what became known as the Kailyard School.

[14] Barrie also authored Jane Annie, a comic opera for Richard D'Oyly Carte (1893), which failed; he persuaded Arthur Conan Doyle to revise and finish it for him.

In 1901 and 1902, he had back-to-back successes; Quality Street was about a respectable, responsible old maid who poses as her own flirtatious niece to try to win the attention of a former suitor returned from the war.

[20] Barrie's more famous and enduring work Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up had its first stage performance on 27 December 1904 at the West End’s Duke of York's Theatre.

The Bloomsbury scenes show the societal constraints of late Victorian and Edwardian middle class domestic reality, contrasted with Neverland, a world where morality is ambivalent.

This parody was in fact reviewed by Barrie himself in a magazine called Sphere as being "funny in little bits", although he also concluded that The Follies were "one of the funniest things now to be seen in London.

[29] In 1887, he founded an amateur cricket team for friends of similarly limited playing ability, and named it the Allahakbarries under the mistaken belief that "Allah akbar" meant "Heaven help us" in Arabic (rather than "God is great").

[34] In 1896, his agent Addison Bright persuaded him to meet with Broadway producer Charles Frohman, who became his financial backer and a close friend, as well.

'[36] Barrie had himself sailed on one of the Lusitania's final Atlantic crossings in September 1914, during which rumours circulated amongst the passengers that the liner was to be transferred to the British Admiralty for troopship duties on arrival in New York.

[38] In the 1930s, Barrie met and told stories to the young daughters of the Duke of York, the future Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret.

Mary had a flair for interior design and set about transforming the ground floor, creating two large reception rooms with painted panelling and adding fashionable features, such as a conservatory.

[43] In the same year, Mary found Black Lake Cottage at Farnham in Surrey, which became the couple's "bolt hole" where Barrie could entertain his cricketing friends and the Llewelyn Davies family.

[44] Beginning in mid-1908, Mary had an affair with Gilbert Cannan (who was twenty years younger than she[45] and an associate of Barrie in his anti-censorship activities), including a visit together to Black Lake Cottage, known only to the house staff.

[46][47] Knowing how painful the divorce was for him, some of Barrie's friends wrote to a number of newspaper editors asking them not to publish the story.

Barrie became acquainted with the family in 1897, meeting George and Jack (and baby Peter) with their nurse (nanny) Mary Hodgson in London's Kensington Gardens.

[52] Barrie became a regular visitor at the Davies household and a common companion to Sylvia and her boys, despite the fact that both he and she were married to other people.

The Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens, erected secretly overnight for May Morning in 1912, was supposed to be modelled upon old photographs of Michael dressed as the character.

[67] Michael, with whom Barrie corresponded daily while at boarding school and university, drowned in 1921, with his friend, Rupert Buxton,[68] at a known danger spot at Sandford Lock near Oxford, one month short of his 21st birthday.

[6] His will also left £500 to the Bower Free Church in Caithness to mark the memory of Rev James Winter who was to have married Barrie's sister in June 1892 but was killed in a fall from his horse in May 1892.