Oliver Goldsmith (10 November 1728-4 April 1774) was an Anglo-Irish author and poet.
Biography[]
Oliver Goldsmith was born in either Ballymahon, County Longford or Elphin, County Roscommon in Ireland in 1728, the son of an Anglican curate. He was raised in County Westmeath, and he was expelled from Trinity College Dublin in 1747 for taking part in a riot at the Marshalsea Prison. He ultimately graduated in 1749, and he busked his way through Flanders, France, Switzerland, and northern Italy before settling in London in 1756. The libertine Goldsmith became a hack writer on Grub Street in Moorfields, but he soon befriended Samuel Johnson and cofounded "the Club", where he befriended Edmund Burke and earned the scorn of Horace Walpole. Goldsmith wrote The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes in 1765, The Vicar of Wakefield in 1766, The Good-Natur'd Man in 1768, The Deserted Village in 1770, and She Stoops to Conquer in 1771, and he died of a kidney infection in 1774.