Kenneth Grahame

Kenneth Grahame (/ˈɡreɪ.əm/ GRAY-əm; 8 March 1859 – 6 July 1932) was a British writer born in Edinburgh, Scotland, to a Scottish family. He is most famous for The Wind in the Willows (1908), one of the classics of children's literature. He also wrote 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 the Disney films The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad and The Reluctant Dragon.

 

While still a young man in his twenties, Grahame began to publish light stories in London periodicals such as the St. James Gazette. Some of these were collected and published as Pagan Papers in 1893, and two years later The Golden Age. These were followed by Dream Days in 1898, which contains The Reluctant Dragon.

 

Kenneth Grahame was born on 8 March 1859 in Edinburgh. When he was a little more than a year old, his father, an advocate, received an appointment as sheriff-substitute in Argyllshire, at Inveraray on Loch Fyne. When he was five, his mother died of puerperal fever, and his father, who had a drinking problem, assigned care of Kenneth, his brother Willie, his sister Helen and the new baby Roland to Granny Ingles, the children's grandmother, in Cookham Dean in the village of Cookham in Berkshire.

Grahame died in Pangbourne, Berkshire, in 1932. He is buried in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford. Grahame's cousin Anthony Hope, also a successful author, wrote him an epitaph: "To the beautiful memory of Kenneth Grahame, husband of Elspeth and father of Alastair, who passed the river on the 6th of July, 1932, leaving childhood and literature through him the more blest for all time.

 

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