The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a humorous novel by the Irish-born English writer Laurence Sterne. It was published in nine volumes across five instalments between 1759 and 1767.

The book says it is a memoir, and its narrator is Tristram Shandy, who begins with the story of his own conception and takes three volumes to reach a description of his birth. He is attempting to explain four accidents in his early life which he is convinced have doomed him to an unhappy future, and along the way he describes the domestic conflicts between his irritable father Walter and his gentle Uncle Toby and inserts humorous discourses on a whole range of intellectual subjects.

Sterne was influenced by the satirists who came before him, among them Rabelais and Cervantes, and the novel is full of innuendo, especially sexual double meanings and unfinished sentences. It parodies serious writers and serious genres, most notably Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy.

The book is also remembered for what it does to the page: blank, black and marbled pages, whole paragraphs censored with asterisks, and diagrams printed in the middle of a sentence. Tristram Shandy was Sterne's first novel, and it turned him from an obscure country clergyman into a literary celebrity.