J. M. Barrie wrote dozens of plays in his lifetime and is best known as the creator of Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up. However, he began his career as a journalist and during his early years as a writer composed some forty short stories; indeed, he ended his prose fiction career with what is arguably his best story. Though often viewed as the sentimental outpourings of a man who refused to grow up and of a writer who dodged the harsher realities of poverty and the severity of the church in his native Scotland, Barrie's short stories, which were well received in their time, provide a clear view of an accepted style of fiction common to late Victorian writing as well as a transition to the more distinctive fictional voices of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence.

James Matthew Barrie was born...