Arthur Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Conan Doyle's family was Roman Catholic thus he attended a preparatory school and then Stonyhurst, a Jesuit Public school in Lancashire. He also spent a year at Feldkirch College in Austria when he was sixteen, and despite being a Jesuit school, Conan Doyle started to draw away from the church and develop his belief in agnosticism. In 1876, Conan Doyle entered medical school at the University of Edinburgh. It was in medical school that he first became interested in spiritualism and met Dr. Joseph who was to become the model for Sherlock Holmes. While he was still a student, Conan Doyle became a surgeon on a whaler that traveled to the Arctic. He graduated in 1881 with a Master of Surgery and again worked on a ship, this time going to West Africa. In 1885, Arthur Conan Doyle married the sister of one of his patients and a year later, he would begin to write his first Sherlock Holmes story.
The first Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet appeared in Beetons' Christmas Annual in 1887. In the following years, Conan Doyle would publish two historical novels, Micah Clarke, and The White Company, as well as another Sherlock Holmes novel The Sign of Four. In 1891, the first Sherlock Holmes short story A Scandal in Bohemia was published in Strand Magazine. Conan Doyle initially published six Sherlock Holmes stories in Strand; he had intended to publish no more. However, the Sherlock Holmes stories were highly popular, and made Strand a much read magazine. When asked to produce more, Conan Doyle named what he thought was an outrageous price for the stories, but the magazine accepted. He wrote six new stories, and was asked to write twelve more. Conan Doyle again raised his price drastically, and again the magazine agreed. The twelve new Sherlock Holmes stories were published in thirteen issues (one being made into two parts) between 1892 and 1893. In 1892, the first twelve stories were collected under the title The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. In 1892, Arthur Conan Doyle and his family traveled to Switzerland, as the climate was thought to be beneficial to his wife's poor health. It was in Switzerland that Conan Doyle saw Reichenbach Falls and imagined a way in which he could end the life of Sherlock Holmes. The Final Problem in which Holmes dies in battle with his enemy was published in 1893 and a year later the second volume of Sherlock Holmes stories was published under the title The Memoirs Of Sherlock Holmes.
Conan Doyle continued to write short stories for Strand as well as a novel about spiritualism entitled The Parasite. When the Boer war began, Conan Doyle was almost forty and could not enlist, so he traveled to South Africa to work in a hospital unit; the experience resulted in The Great Boer War published in 1900. A year later, the character of Sherlock Holmes was revived. Conan Doyle imagined a ghost story with a rational explanation. The novel was not originally meant as a Sherlock Holmes story, but the character fit with the plot and The Hound of the Baskervilles was serialized in Strand between 1901 and 1902. In 1902, he also published The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, which defended Great Britain's role in the war. Soon after its publication, he received a knighthood for services to his country. In 1903, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle resurrected the Sherlock Holmes character with an explanation that he had not truly died in The Final Problem. Conan Doyle had been offered large sums of money from the American Colliers Weekly, and Strand to produce more Sherlock Holmes stories.
In 1912, Conan Doyle created another character and pursued the genre of science fiction. He wrote the first of his Professor George Edward Challenger series, entitled The Lost World about a race of dinosaurs existing in the twentieth century on a plateau in South America. During World War I, he wrote propaganda articles and pamphlets as well as a history of the war while was being waged. He continued to write Sherlock Holmes stories, but not for monthly publication, and he increasingly wrote about spiritualism as well as more Professor Challenger stories. He died on July 7, 1930 after being stricken with angina pectoris the previous year. He was buried at his estate in Windlesham.
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