Three Men In a Boat is one of very few humorous classics but who wrote it?

It was written by an actor, ex-schoolmaster and clerk in the City of London. His name was Jerome Klapka Jerome, born at Walsali, near Wolverhampton, May 2, 1859.

Turning to literature, his first book was On the Stage and Off, published 1885, an account of his theatrical adventures. Four years later his masterpiece Three Men in a Boat appeared. It received immediate wide and prolonged popularity. Jerome later wrote some plays of which The Passing of the Third Floor Back is the best known. He died June 14, 1927.