The Wind in the Willows

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame


Publisher: Avon (Avon Camelot Book), third library printing January 1, 1966#: ZS101
Paperback4.05 x 7 inches, 224 pages

Kenneth Grahame (8 March 1859 – 6 July 1932) was a British writer born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He is most famous for The Wind in the Willows (1908), one of the classics of children's literature, as well as The Reluctant Dragon. Both books were later adapted for stage and film, of which A. A. Milne's Toad of Toad Hall, based on part of The Wind in the Willows, was the first. Other adaptations include Cosgrove Hall's The Wind in the Willows (and its subsequent long-running television series), and the Walt Disney films (The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad and The Reluctant Dragon).
----------------------The Wind in the Willows is a Children's Classic book by the British novelist Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. Alternatingly slow-moving and fast-paced, it focuses on four anthropomorphised animals: Mole, Rat (a European water vole), Toad, and Badger. They live in a pastoral version of Edwardian England.

In 1908, Grahame retired from his position as secretary of the Bank of England. He moved back to Berkshire, where he had lived as a child, and spent his time by the River Thames, doing much as the animal characters in his book do – to quote, "simply messing about in boats" – and expanding the bedtime stories he had earlier told his son Alastair into a manuscript for the book.

The novel was in its 31st printing when A. A. Milne adapted part of it for the stage as Toad of Toad Hall in 1929. The first film adaptation was produced by Walt Disney as one of two segments in the 1949 package film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Numerous adaptations in film and television have followed since.

In 2003, The Wind in the Willows was listed at #16 in the BBC's survey The Big Read. More than a century after its original publication, it was adapted again for the stage, as a 2014 musical by Julian Fellowes.