BookSeriesInOrder.com





Book Notification

Jerome K. Jerome Books In Order

Book links take you to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn money from qualifying purchases.

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)Description / Buy at Amazon
Three Men in a Boat (1889)Description / Buy at Amazon
Three Men on the Bummel (1889)Description / Buy at Amazon
Diary of a Pilgrimage (1891)Description / Buy at Amazon
On the Stage--And Off - The Brief Career of a Would-Be-Actor (1891)Description / Buy at Amazon
Novel Notes (1893)Description / Buy at Amazon
They and I (1909)Description / Buy at Amazon
All Roads Lead to Calvary (1919)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

The Haunted Mill / The Ruined House (1891)Description / Buy at Amazon
The New Utopia (1891)Description / Buy at Amazon
Tea-Table Talk (1903)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Master of Mrs. Chilvers (1911)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Cost of Kindness, and Clocks (2007)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Lesson (2014)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Collections

Told After Supper (1891)Description / Buy at Amazon
After-Supper Ghost Stories (1891)Description / Buy at Amazon
Second thoughts of an idle fellow By (1898)Description / Buy at Amazon
Evergreens & Other Short Stories (1982)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Other Jerome K. Jerome (1984)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Passing of the Third Floor Back and Other Stories (2001)Description / Buy at Amazon
Told After Supper and Other Stories and Poems of Christmas (By: Alfred Tennyson) (2006)Description / Buy at Amazon
Selected Short Stories From Jerome K. Jerome (2007)Description / Buy at Amazon
On the Art of Making Up One's Mind (2008)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Angel and the Author--And Others (2011)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Works of Jerome K. Jerome (2013)Description / Buy at Amazon
Three Men in the Dark: Tales of Terror (2017)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

My Life and Times (1926)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Found on The Shelves of The London Library Books

with Barry Pain, CharlesSpencer, George Herschell, William Banting
On Corpulence: Feeding the Body and Feeding the Mind (By: William Banting) (2016)Description / Buy at Amazon
Cycling: The Craze of the Hour (With: Barry Pain,CharlesSpencer,George Herschell) (2016)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Noble English Art of Self-Defence (By: Various) (2016)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Anthologies

The 5th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories(1969)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Seventeenth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories(1981)Description / Buy at Amazon
65 Great Spine Chillers(1982)Description / Buy at Amazon
Handle with Care: Frightening Stories(1985)Description / Buy at Amazon
100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories(1993)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Second Christmas Megapack(2012)Description / Buy at Amazon
30 Eternal Masterpieces of Humorous Stories(2019)Description / Buy at Amazon
Classic Cat Stories(2020)Description / Buy at Amazon

Jerome K. Jerome was an English author who wrote many popular works in his time. He is best known as the author of Three Men in a Boat, a comic travelogue, and Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow.

Jerome was born in 1859 in Caldmore, Walsall, England and he passed away in 1927 in Northampton. He was born as the fourth child of Marquerite Jones and Jerome Clapp. His father would later rename himself to Jerome Clapp Jerome which lead to Jerome’s unique name. His dad really liked the name Jerome, apparently. His name was originally James Clapp Jerome as well, but he would later change his middle name to Klapka after the the exiled Hungarian general György Klapka.

His father was an iron monger and lay preacher, who also did architecture. Jerome had a brother who died at an early age, but he also had two sisters in Paulina and Bladina. Jerome’s family struggled with poverty after his father made some bad investments in the local mining industry.

The senior Jerome died when the author was only 13 and he had to go to work. He originally had plans to go into politics or become a man of letters, but the death of his father forced him to find work to support himself. He ended up working at the London and North Western Railway where he started collecting coal that fell along the side of the railway.

Jerome’s sister Blandina had a love for theatre so he decided to try his hand at acting. He took the stage name of Harold Crichton and joined a repertory theatre. He would spend three years on the road with the troupe without a ton of success and decided to try his hand at another career. Jerome tried to become a journalist, but it did not work out for him. He wrote essays, satires, and short stories, but most of them were rejected. Jerome took a number of other jobs including as a school teacher and a solicitor’s clerk, but he kept writing as his goal. He finally had some success with On the Stage – and Off in 1885 which was a comic memoir about his experiences with the acting trouple.

After that bit of success, Jerome met and married Georgina Elizabeth Henrietta Stanley Marris. She had been married, but she divorced her husband and married Jerome just nine days later. His wife had a child in her previous marriage, a girl named Elsie who would come to live with them. After the marriage, Jerome and Georgina took a honeymoon on a little boat on the Thames. This honeymoon experience would prove to be rather important in his career as it was the direct inspiration for Three Men in a Boat. Most consider that to be the most important work of his career and he sat down to write it just after returning for the honeymoon.

As Jerome began writing Three Men in a Boat he decided to replace his wife with two of his friends in the novel. This allowed the story to have more comic situations. The thing that make this special was the way that he combined those situations with the history of the Thames region. Jerome published the book in 1889 and it became an instant success. The book has been in print ever since then which is over 130 years at this point. In fact, the book was so popular upon release that the number of boats in the Thames went up fifty percent in the next year after its publication and Thames became a huge tourist attraction.

The book was one of the biggest successes of its time as it sold over a million copies during the first twenty years of release. The story was even made into a radio show and then adapted from film and television as well as stage plays and even a musical. The book and Jerome’s writing style in it became highly influential as well and inspired many humorists and satirists across the world.

Best of all, for the Jerome family, was the financial security that the book’s success brought them. Jerome was able to give up all the odds jobs that he had worked and focus full-time on writing. While he never was able to recapture the success of Three Men in a Boat, he was able to write number of plays, essays, and novels including a sequel to Three Men in a Boat.

World War I broke out towards the end of his life and Jerome volunteered to fight for his country, but he was rejected due to his age. He was 56 years old at the time. Being rejected by the British Army didn’t phase him though and he ended up volunteering for the French Army as an ambulance driver.

Jerome published his autobiography in 1926 and was then given the title of Freeman of the Borough by the Borough of Walsall. In 1927, he would suffer a paralytic stroke and a cerebral haemorrhage in June 1927 and die shortly after.

Three Men in a Boat is Jerome K. Jerome’s most famous novel and one that still reads as contemporary even today. The book was originally intended as a serious travel guide with bits of local history, but the humorous elements really took over in the writing and what it is best known for. The story follows three men on a boating trip. The characters are based on Jerome himself and his friends, George and Harris.

The three also take a dog on their boating trip up the River Thames. The three set off on a Saturday, but George has to work so J. and Harris make their way to Kingston by train. They ended up not being able to find the right train and bribe a train driver to them there. Once there, they meet George and begin their trip. The story describes their river journey and the events that occur, with bits of history on landmarks and local villages included in the book.

Book Series In Order » Authors » Jerome K. Jerome

Leave a Reply