Jerome was mainly regarded as a "new humorist," and his best-known work, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) (1889), remains the standard by which he is judged. He also wrote serious works, but contemporary reviewers often criticized him because his fiction was not always humorous; sometimes it turned sentimental or moralistic. Jerome was also an editor for the Idler (1892-1897) and To-day (1893-1897), monthly and weekly journals, respectively, furnishing entertaining articles, fiction, and specialty features on books, theater, and politics. Two collections of his short stories, John Ingerfield and Other Stories (1894) and Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green (1897), are drawn from pieces that he published in these two magazines. Aside from a few ghost stories collected in anthologies from 1960 to 1990 by several editors, including Alfred Hitchcock and Red Skelton, Jerome's short fiction is hardly read today.
Jerome was born in Walsall, Staffordshire, on 2 May 1859, the year of the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, an ironic fact since Jerome was raised as a Dissenter.
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