Tom Stoppard (pronounced Stop-pard, with equal accents on both syllables) was born Tomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia on July 3, 1937. His name was changed when his mother married British army major Kenneth Stoppard after the death of the boy's father. Educated from the age of five (in English) in India and from the age of nine in England, Stoppard left school at seventeen to become a journalist before deciding in 1960, at the age of twenty-three, to become a full-time writer.

Before becoming an "overnight" sensation with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard worked as a free-lance writer and drama critic in London, writing stage plays, television plays, radio plays, short stories, and his only novel, Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon. The turning point in his writing career came in 1963 when his agent, Kenneth Ewing, wondered in casual conversation who the King of England might have been during the...