LIFE:

Son of an English officer and an Irish woman. After having finished grammar school he enters at the Jesus College in Cambridge where he has preference for the study of classics, Rabelais and French humorists as well as becomes enthusiastic about the philosophy of Locke. In 1738 he begins the ecclesiastical career in the Anglican Church and participates to the local political vicissitudes with polemical articles and letters. He spends the following 21 years of his life as Vicar in the Yorkshire, preaching eccentric sermons and dedicating more attentions to many other women than his wife, Elizabeth Lumley. In 1760 he moves to London where, despite the tuberculosis, lives an intensive and dissolute social life. The first two volumes of Tristam Shandy are published and these produce remarkable sensation for the originality of the literary style. For health reasons he begins travelling a lot, especially in France (Tolouse) and Italy. When he comes back to London he meets Elisabeth Draper, for which he will write, before his death, Letters from Yorick to Elisa.

SUGGESTED WORKS:

The Life and Opinion of Tristam Shandy, 1759-1767
It's his masterpiece. It's an unfinished, unusual and bizarre work, written in those days when the modern novel is beginning to grow and narrative structures still appear in a experimental phase. Here he represents the topics of absurdities and contradictions of human beings levelling a burning charge against conventions of his time. Reality proceeds according to associations of ideas, using digressions and overturning the chronological consistency and the cause and effect relationship. At the end of the novel the thematic changes radically anticipating the inner argument of the Sentimental Journey.
About the life and opinions of the hero the reader really find a few, because the work is unfinished: Tristam, born at half of the novel, in the last part has just reached his youth. It lacks a proper plot, while is plentiful of pathetic or comic personages. There are infinite digressions about anything and typographical madnesses: white pages, erasures, a whole chapter made only with interjections, and other bizarre things.

OTHER WORKS:

A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, 1768
Famous in Italy for the translation made by Ugo Foscolo. The fundamental topics of this novel are the free search of oneself and others, through compassion and sentimental participation, valid and usefully employable forces of not intellectual order.

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