The Wind in the Willows
The Wind in the Willows is a children's novel by the Scottish novelist Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. It details the story of Mole, Ratty, and Badger as they try to help Mr. Toad, after he becomes obsessed with motorcars and gets into trouble. It also details short stories about them that are disconnected from the main narrative. The novel was based on bedtime stories Kenneth Grahame told his son Alastair. It has been adapted numerous times for both stage and screen.
A number of publishers rejected the manuscript. It was published in the UK by Methuen and Co., and later in the US by Scribner. The critics, who were hoping for a third volume in the style of Grahame's earlier works, The Golden Age and Dream Days, generally gave negative reviews. The public loved it, however, and within a few years it sold in such numbers that many reprints were required. In 1909, then US President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Grahame to tell that he had "read it and reread it, and have come to accept the characters as old friends". In The Enchanted Places, Christopher Robin Milne wrote of The Wind in the Willows:
A book that we all greatly loved and admired and read aloud or alone, over and over and over: The Wind in the Willows. This book is, in a way, two separate books put into one. There are, on the one hand, those chapters concerned with the adventures of Toad; and on the other hand there are those chapters that explore human emotions – the emotions of fear, nostalgia, awe, wanderlust.
The Wind in the Willows was listed at No. 16 in the BBC's survey The Big Read and has been adapted multiple times in different mediums.
Excerpted from The Wind in the Willows on Wikipedia.
The Wind in the Willows
| Author | Kenneth Grahame |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Genre | Children's Literature, Fantasy, Adventure. |
| Copyright | Public domain worldwide. |
| Book cover | Cover of the first edition (8 October 1908) Author: W. Graham Robertson/Kenneth Grahame | wikimedia |
| Ebooks | Project Gutenberg |
| Scans | Google-digitized |
| Audio | Librivox | Internet Archive Reader: Adrian Praetzellis 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 |
| Read online | The Wind in the Willows |
