Laurence Sterne

Laurence Sterne (1713–1768) was an Anglo-Irish clergyman and novelist. The son of an impoverished army officer, he was educated at Cambridge and spent twenty obscure years as a country parson in Yorkshire before the first volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759) made him the sensation of London. He published nine volumes of the novel over eight years, together with his sermons under the name of Parson Yorick, and traveled in France and Italy in search of health, a journey that became A Sentimental Journey (1768). He died of consumption weeks after its publication. His playful, digressive, typographically eccentric fiction anticipated the modern novel.