Author

William Makepeace Thackeray

1811–1863 4 volumes Literary Classics · Comedy & Satire

The life

William Makepeace Thackeray was an English novelist born in Calcutta, sent home to school at five, and left an orphan's fortune that he lost at cards and in failed newspapers before he was thirty. He turned to writing for a living, and Vanity Fair (1848) made him Dickens's chief rival. A satirist by instinct, he drew his own illustrations and refused to supply his readers with heroes.

Where to start

The Fatal Boots

56 pages — the shortest way into Thackeray, not the greatest.

Some poet has observed, that if any man would write down what has really happened to him in this mortal life, he would be sure to make a good book, though he never had met with a single adventure from his birth to his burial.

Paintings from these volumes