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British poet and dramatist James Elroy Flecker was born Herman Elroy Flecker in London, England, in 1884. His father, Rev. W.H. Flecker, was appointed headmaster of the Dean Close School in Cheltenham, England. The family lived on campus, and young Herman spent most of his youth there. He came to writing poetry at an early age (13), and at age 16 he was sent to Uppingham and from there to Trinity College, Oxford (where he changed his first name from Herman to James), which he attended from 1902 to 1906.
At Oxford he achieved average grades, but that was due mainly to his obsession with French poetry, to which he devoted much of the time he should have spent studying the school's classical curriculum. It was also at Oxford that, despite the strict evangelical Protestant upbringing by his father, he rejected Christianity and became an agnostic.
Upon graduation from Oxford he secured a job teaching at a private school in Hempstead at the end of 1906. He had decided that he wanted to become an interpreter in the consular service, so he set about learning as many languages as he could. He already spoke French and German, and to those he added Italian, Spanish and modern Greek. In 1908 he passed the consular service examination, and then began a two-year course in modern languages at Cambridge.
In June of 1910 he was posted by the consular service to Constantinople, Turkey, but shortly afterwards he was discovered to have tuberculosis and was returned to England to recover at a sanitarium in the Cotswolds, where he stayed for three months. He had already published two books of verse, "The Bridge of Fire" and "Thirty-Six Poems", and it was at the sanitarium that he wrote the play "Don Juan". When he left the sanitarium he traveled to London and Paris, then back to Constantinople and from there to Beirut, Lebanon, where he was vice-consul and where he married a Greek woman, Helle Skiadaressi. In May of 1913 he began to have major health problems--tuberculosis again--and was taken to a sanitarium in Switzerland. He spent the last few years of his life in a variety of sanitariums in that country. It was during that period that he re-converted to Christianity.
James Elroy Flecker died in Davos, Switzerland, on January 3, 1915.
