Lewis Carroll
Bio: Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) is the pseudonym of the English writer and mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, known especially for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872), children's books that are also distinguished as satire and as examples of verbal wit. Carroll invented his pen name by translating his first two names into the Latin "Carolus Lodovicus" and then anglicizing it into "Lewis Carroll."
The son of a clergyman and the firstborn of 11 children, Carroll began at an early age to entertain himself and his family with magic tricks, marionette shows, and poems written for homemade newspapers. From 1846 to 1850 he attended Rugby School; he graduated from Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1854. Carroll remained there, lecturing on mathematics and writing treatises and guides for students. Although he took deacon's orders in 1861, Carroll was never ordained a priest, partly because he was afflicted with a stammer that made preaching difficult and partly, perhaps, because he had discovered other interests. Among Carroll's avocations was photography, at which he became proficient. He excelled especially at photographing children. Alice Liddell, one of the three daughters of Henry George Liddell, the dean of Christ Church, was one of his photographic subjects and the model for the fictional Alice.
Carroll's comic and children's works also include The Hunting of the Snark (1876), two collections of humorous verse, and the two parts of Sylvie and Bruno (1889, 1893), unsuccessful attempts to re-create the Alice fantasies.
As a mathematician, Carroll was conservative and derivative. As a logician, he was more interested in logic as a game than as an instrument for testing reason. In his diversions as a photographer and author of comic fantasy, he is most memorable and original--the man who, for example, contributed, in "Jabberwocky," the word chortle, a portmanteau word that combines "snort" and "chuckle," to the English language.
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Lewis Carroll is best remembered for this story, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, both of which are children's books with content and style that have often appealed as much to adult readers as to the young. It was published in 1865 and was in fact with a particular child in mind, Alice Liddell, and had the working title "Alice's Adventures Under Ground". As befits that title, the tale is indeed of a trip (with the additional psychedelic sense certainly ... 
Conceived by a shy British don on a golden afternoon to entertain ten-year-old Alice Liddell and her sisters, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass have delighted generations of readers in more than eighty languages. "The clue to the enduring fascination and greatness of the Alice books," writes A. S. Byatt in her Introduction, "lies in language .... It is play, and word-play, and its endless intriguing puzzles continue to reveal themselves long after we have ceased to b... 
