 Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Family tradition would have dictated the pursuit of an artistic career, yet Arthur decided to follow a medical one. This decision was influenced by Dr. Bryan Charles Waller, a young lodger his mother had taken-in to make ends meet. Dr. Waller had trained in the University of Edinburgh and that is where Arthur was sent to carry out his medical studies.
The young medical student met a number of future authors who were also attending the university, such as for instance JM Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson. But the man who most impressed and influenced him, was without a doubt, one of his teachers, Dr. Joseph Bell. The good doctor was a master at observation, logic, deduction, and diagnosis. All these qualities were later to be found in the persona of the celebrated detective Sherlock Holmes.
In March 1886, Conan Doyle started writing the novel which catapulted him to fame. At first it was named A Tangled Skein and the two main characters were called Sheridan Hope and Ormond Sacker. Two years later this novel was published in Beeton's Christmas Annual, under the title A Study in Scarlet which introduced us to the immortal Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.
In August of 1889, Joseph Marshall Stoddart, who published the Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in Philadelphia, came to London to organize a British edition of his magazine. He invited Conan Doyle for dinner in London at the elegant Langham Hotel which was to be mentioned later in a number of Holmesian adventures, and he also asked Oscar Wilde, who by then was already quite well known.
As a result of this literary soirée, Lippincott's commissioned the young doctor to write a short novel, which they published in England and the US in February of 1890. This story was The Sign of The Four and was instrumental in establishing Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle once and for all in the annals of literature.
Many other novels followed including The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Lost World. Arthur Conan Doyle died on Monday, July 7, 1930, surrounded by his family. [edit]
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