The Wind in the Willows

Kenneth Grahame

Purnell, 1984 - Juvenile Fiction - 194 pages

Contents

• Chapter page 1 The River Bank: 13
• The Open Road: 27
• The Wild Wood: 40

About the author

Kenneth Grahame was born in Edinburgh on March 3, 1859. When he was five years old, his mother died of scarlet fever and he nearly died himself, of the same disease. His father became an alcoholic and sent the children to Berkshire to live with relatives. They were later reunited with their father, but after a failed year, the children never heard from him again. Sometime later, one of his brothers died at the age of fifteen. He attended St. Edward's School as a child and intended to go on to Oxford University, but his relatives wanted him to go into banking. He worked in his uncle's office, in Westminster, for two years then went to work at the Bank of England as a clerk in 1879. He spent nearly thirty years there and became the Secretary of the Bank at the age of thirty-nine. He retired from the bank right before The Wind in the Willows was published in 1908. He wrote essays on topics that included smoking, walking and idleness. Many of the essays were published as the book Pagan Papers (1893) and the five orphan characters featured in the papers were developed into the books The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898). The Wind in the Willows (1908) was based on bedtime stories and letters to his son and it is where the characters Rat, Badger, Mole and Toad were created. In 1930, Milne's stage version was brought to another audience in Toad of Toad Hall. Grahame died on July 6, 1932. Val was born Balint Stephen Biro, in the city of Budapest, in Hungary, on the 6th October 1921. He attended a small primary school till he was eleven, when he entered a large school of seven hundred pupils run by the monks of the Cistercian order. It was one of the three great monastic schools of Hungary. The politics of the mid thirties, dominated by the rise of Nazism and Fascism slowly came to increasingly influence the people of Hungary and Val's father, recognizing what was happening, arranged in 1939, for his eighteen year old son to go to London to study art. Val never saw his father again. Val hero worshipped his father who sadly died in 1944 only two days before the Gestapo called to arrest him as a political suspect. Val left for England in July 1939, and stayed at Polperro with the McCloy family whose son had spent the previous summer with the Biro's in Budapest. Val was required to register in September as an 'Enemy Alien' with the police. Val Biro lives in West Sussex with his wife. He was born in Hungary and trained as an artist in Budapest before coming to London to study at the Central School. He worked in publishing before coming a freelance illustrator and starting this popular series. Val designed 30 book cover illustrations for Nigel Tranter's, 'Scotlands Storyteller', books between 1951 and 1980.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Wind in the Willows; A Purnell de luxe classic
• Author: Kenneth Grahame
• Illustrated by: Val Biro
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Purnell, 1984
• ISBN: 0361062532, 9780361062534
• Length: 194 pages
• Subjects: Juvenile Fiction / Animals / General