Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Doyle's literary output was prodigious. During his writing career, he wrote 21 novels and over 150 short stories, and he also published non-fiction, essays, articles, memoirs, and three volumes of poetry. But his magnum opus was undoubtedly Sherlock Holmes. He was a versatile and complex personality; a physician by education, he was also a keen sportsman, a war correspondent, a campaigner for social justice, and an active spiritualist.