Born in 1811 in Calcutta, India, where his father worked for the East India Company. First and only child of Richmond Thackeray and Anne Becher Thackeray. Sent to school in England, as was the fashion for colonial-born children His father had died in 1815 and his mother remarried to her first love, Captain Henry Carmichael-Smyth. They joined William in England in 1820.
Like most English children, William was miserable at school but he developed two habits: sketching and reading novels. Thackeray attended Cambridge, where he lost a poetry contest to one Alfred Tennyson, though several of William's satirical poems were published around this time. During 1831-33 Thackeray studied law at the Middle Temple, London, but had little enthusiasm to continued his studies. He also began to study art, while he supported himself by selling sketches and working at a bill discounting firm.
Thackeray abandoned his studies without taking a degree, having lost some of his inheritance of twenty thousand pounds through gambling. In the beginning of the 1830s he visited Germany, where he met Goethe. In 1833 he brought with a large heritage the National Standard, but lost his fortune a year later in the Indian bank failures and other bad investments.
His mother and stepfather, mostly broke due to an economic collapse in India (where they'd left most of their money), scraped together all of the funds they could find and started a newspaper called the Constitution. William was appointed the paper's Paris correspondent at £450 per year. He'd also had a little book of satirical essays on the ballet published.
In 1836 he married a poor Irish girl, Isabella Shawe; they had three daughters.The birth of their first child, nne Thackeray Ritchie (1837-1919) who became a writer and whose impressionistic texts impressed Virginia Woolf,nne Thackeray Ritchie (1837-1919) who became a writer and whose impressionistic texts impressed Virginia Woolf, was followed by the collapse of the Constitution.
William began writing as many articles as humanly possible and sending them to any newspaper that would print them. This was a precarious sort of existence which would continue for most of the rest of his life. He was fortunate enough to get two popular series going in two different publications. Thackeray began to contribute regularly to Fraser's Magazine, Morning Chronicle, New Monthly Magazine and The Times. His writings attracted first attention in Punch, where he satirized English snobbery. These sketches reappeared in 1848 as THE BOOK OF SNOBS, stating in it that "he who meanly admires mean things is a Snob." In 1840 Isabella Thackeray suffered a mental breakdown, from which she never recovered, through she survived Thackeray by thirty years. The author was forced to send his children to France to his mother. The children returned to England in 1846 to live with him. In the 1840s Thackeray started to gain name as a writer. In Vanity Fair he gave a panoramic picture of high life in England, and created one of the most fascinating immoral female characters, Becky Sharp. "I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year." (from Vanity Fair) The book brought him prosperity and made him established writer and popular lecturer in Europe and in the United States. His increasing love for Jane Brookfield, the wife of an old Cambridge friend, led to a rupture in their friendship. THE HISTORY OF HENRY ESMOND appeared in three volumes in 1852, and reflected the melancholic period in the life of the author. "'Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel." By the end of his career, Thackeray's disillusionment with contemporary culture seems to have deepened. In THE ADVENTURES OF PHILIP (1862) the protagonist, Philip, is out of place in a world that does not accommodate his vision of masculinity.
His personal life, however, wasn't going so well. His second daughter died at less than a year old. S third daughter was born but his wife fell victim to some sort of mental illness. After she tried to drown three-year old Annie, and she was so suicidal that she was placed in a private institution where she remained for the rest of her life. She outlived her husband by thirty years.
Continually ill with recurrent kidney infections caused by a bout with syphillis in his youth, Thackeray still managed to have an impressive house built and settle generous dowries on his daughters.
In 1859, he and a friend named George Smith started an inexpensive monthly called the Cornhill Magazine, which set a first issue sales record at over 110,000 copies. William, besides editing, contributed a great series of essays called the Roundabout Papers.
He died in Christmas Eve, 1863 of a cerebral effusion (a burst blood vessel).
Minnie, Thackeray's younger daughter, married Leslie Stephen who became editor of the Cornhill Magazine. After Minnie's sudden death at 35 he remarried and became the father of Virginia Woolf.

Works
THE YELLOWPLUSH PAPERS, 1838
THE PARIS SKETCH BOOK, 1840
THE HISTORY OF SAMUEL TITMARSH AND THE GREAT HOGGARTY DIAMOND, 1841 - Samuel Titmarsh eli tarina isosta Hoggartyn timantista
THE IRIS SKETCH BOOK, 1843
THE LUCK OF BARRY LYNDON, 1844 - film 1975, dir. by Stanley Kubrick- starring Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Kruger.
NOTES OF A JOUNEY FROM CORNHILL TO GRAND CAIRO, 1846
THE BOOK OF SNOBS, 1848
VANITY FAIR, 1847-48 - film Becky Sharp, dir. by Rouben Mamoulian, 1935, starring Miriam Hopkins, Cedric Hardwicke, Frances Dee
THE HISTORY OF PENDENNIS, 1848-50
REBECCA AND ROWENA, 1850
THE HISTORY OF PENDENNIS, 1850
THE ENGLISH HUMOURISTS OF THE 18TH CENTURY, 1851
HENRY ESMOND, 1852, 3 vol. -
THE ENGLISH HUMORISTS OF THE 18TH CENTURY, 1853
THE NEWCOMES, 1853-55
THE ROSE AND THE RING, 1855
MISCELLANIES, 4 vol., 1855-57
THE VIRGINIANS, 1857-59 THE FOUR GEORGES, 1860 LOVEL THE WIDOWER, 1860 POEMS AND ESSAYS, 1860 THE ADVENTURES OF PHILIP ON HIS WAY THROUGH THE WORLD, 1862 ROUNDABOUT PAPERS, 1860-63 DENIS DUVAL, 1864 COLLECTED ED., 1867-69 LETTERS AND PRIVATE PAPERS, 1945-46

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