William Makepeace Thackeray

William Makepeace Thackeray was a British novelist, born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) on 18 July 1811 and died on 24 December 1863. Sent to England as a child, he was educated there and spent some of his early adult years drifting between university, travel and journalism. He found his living as a writer and illustrator for magazines, especially Punch, where his sharp humour about social pretension made his name.

His great success came with Vanity Fair, which established him as one of the leading Victorian novelists, often set beside his contemporary Charles Dickens. Thackeray wrote with a worldly, ironic narrator who gently and sometimes sternly exposes vanity, snobbery and ambition. He also wrote historical fiction, essays and a much loved children's fairy tale. He matters today for his comic intelligence and his clear-eyed portrait of English society.