Thomas Burke

British essayist and novelist Thomas Burke was born in London in 1886. His father died when Thomas was still an infant. He lived on and off with a succession of relatives, and spent four years in an orphanage. After graduating school at age 15 he took a variety of jobs, but his interest was always in writing (he sold his first story at age 16). He worked for a used-book seller and later a literary agency. A publisher saw some of his privately published poems and anthologies and commissioned him to write a book. He wrote a series of sketches about life in London called "Nights in Town". That was followed by a volume of short stories, "Limehouse Nights". That book met with considerable success, and he was afterward commissioned to write by both British and American publishers. He wrote in a variety of forms, including short stories, essays, novels, poems and even penned several songs. Probably his best known work was the short story "The Chink and the Child", which was made into a very successful movie by D.W. Griffith called Broken Blossoms (1919) in 1919 and again in 1936 (Broken Blossoms (1936)). He died in London in 1945 at age 58.