Laurence Sterne

Laurence Sterne was a Yorkshire parson who, at forty-six, published the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy and became the toast of London. The novel, which takes nine volumes to get its hero past his third year, with digressions, black pages, marbled pages and a squiggle for a flourish of a stick, is the first to make its own telling the subject. A Sentimental Journey, published weeks before his death from tuberculosis in 1768, gave the age the word sentimental. He was preached against and imitated everywhere, and the modernists claimed him as a founder.