J.M. Barrie (Kirriemuir, Scotland, 1860 - London, 1937) was a Scottish writer and playwright best known as the creator of Peter Pan. Born into a family of modest craftsmen, he had a happy childhood until the death of a brother when he was just six years old deeply altered family life and disturbed his mother's mental health, turning her into an unbalanced, authoritarian, and inflexible person, whose influence and memory forever weighed on James. Barrie's main longing for the rest of his life was to regain the happiness of his early years and he always maintained a childlike nuance in his personality. In London, he gained fame with his novels and plays. It was also there that he met the children of the Llewelyn Davies family, who inspired him to write Peter Pan, the play about a boy who did not want to grow up and about Wendy, his adventure partner in Neverland. Years later he turned it into a novel: Peter and Wendy was a true phenomenon in the Edwardian era, the British Belle Époque that combined years of innocence, hedonism, and carefreeness before World War I.
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