Oliver Goldsmith (10 November 1728 – 4 April 1774) was an Anglo-Irish writer best known for his works The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), The Good-Natur'd Man (1768), The Deserted Village (1770) and She Stoops to Conquer (1771).

He was born either in the townland of Pallas, near Ballymahon, County Longford, Ireland, where his father was the Anglican curate of the parish of Forgney, or at the residence of his maternal grandparents, at the Smith Hill House near Elphin in County Roscommon, where his grandfather Oliver Jones was a clergyman and master of the Elphin diocesan school, and where Oliver studied.

Perennially in debt and addicted to gambling, Goldsmith produced a massive output as a hack writer on Grub Street[4][5][6][7] for the publishers of London, but his few painstaking works earned him the company of Samuel Johnson, with whom he was a founding member of "The Club".

There, through fellow Club member Edmund Burke, he made the acquaintance of Sir George Savile, who would later arrange a job for him at Thornhill Grammar School.

The combination of his literary work and his dissolute lifestyle led Horace Walpole to give him the epithet "inspired idiot".

During this period he used the pseudonym "James Willington" (the name of a fellow student at Trinity) to publish his 1758 translation of the autobiography of the Huguenot Jean Marteilhe.

In 1760 Goldsmith began to publish a series of letters in the Public Ledger under the title The Citizen of the World which brought him fame.

[8] Purportedly written by a Chinese traveller in England by the name of Lien Chi, they used this fictional outsider's perspective to comment ironically and at times moralistically on British society and manners.

The poem is notable for its interesting portrayal of a hermit, who is fond of the natural world and his wilderness solitude but maintains a gentle, sympathetic demeanour toward other people.

[9] In the 1760s Goldsmith witnessed the demolition of an ancient village and the destruction of its farms to clear land to become a wealthy man's garden.

The money that he sporadically earned was often frittered away or happily given away to the next good cause that presented itself so that any financial security tended to be fleeting and short-lived.

Goldsmith was described by contemporaries as prone to envy, a congenial but impetuous and disorganised personality who once planned to emigrate to America but failed because he missed his ship.

"Oliver Goldsmith: A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian, who left scarcely any style of writing untouched, and touched nothing that he did not adorn.

Two characters in the 1951 comedy The Lavender Hill Mob quote the same line from Goldsmith's poem "The Traveller" – a subtle joke, because the film's plot involves the recasting of stolen gold.

During the opening credits of the SKY One adaptation of Sir Terry Pratchett's Christmas-like story "The Hogfather", a portrait of Goldsmith is shown as part of a hall of memorials to those "inhumed" by the "Ankh-Morpork Assassins' Guild".