Carroll pictured with Mrs. George Macdonald and children. He was encouraged by the Macdonald children to write down the stories he often told them. This is how "Alice" emerged. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (January 27, 1832 - January 14, 1898), better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English writer, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the Snark" and "Jabberwocky", all examples of the genre of literary nonsense. He is noted for his facility at word play, logic, and fantasy. As a very young child, he suffered a fever that left him deaf in one ear. At the age of seventeen, he suffered a severe attack of whooping cough, which was probably responsible for his chronically weak chest in later life. Within the academic discipline of mathematics, he worked primarily in the fields of geometry, matrix algebra, mathematical logic and recreational mathematics, producing nearly a dozen books under his real name. He also developed new ideas in the study of elections (e.g., Dodgson's method) and committees. He worked as a mathematics tutor at Oxford, an occupation that gave him some financial security. He died in 1898 of pneumonia following influenza just two weeks of his 66th birthday.