![]() He meets Rat, and the two become friends. Commentators have noted that the book consists of three complimentary narratives: the adventures of Toad, the tale of the friendship of Rat and Mole, and two lyrical chapters on nature entitled "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" and "Wayfarers All." The story begins when Mole abandons the spring cleaning of his underground home to take a walk along the riverbank, emerging from the dark world of his mole-hole for the first time (born from what Grahame describes as a "spirit of divine discontent"). The Wind in the Willows focuses on the adventures of a group of four anthropomorphic animal friends: Mole, Badger, Rat, and Toad. He died in Pangbourne, England, on July 6, 1932. Following the publication of The Wind in the Willows, Grahame travelled widely but wrote very little. The bedtime stories Grahame invented for his son eventually evolved into his masterpiece, The Wind in the Willows, a novel which recreated the idyllic world the author himself had glimpsed as a child. Grahame married Elspeth Thomson in 1899, and the couple had one child, Alastair. A collection of essays he published attracted some notice, but it was his short stories, later collected in The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898), that established Grahame as a celebrated literary figure. James' Gazette, The Yellow Book, and the National Observer. Grahame remained with the bank while pursuing writing as a vocation, with examples of his work appearing in such prestigious Victorian periodicals, as the St. Edward's School, Oxford, from 1868 through 1876, and, although he hoped to enter the University, his uncle, upon whom he was financially dependent, forced him into a clerkship with the Bank of England. The same year, an attempt to reunite the Grahame children with their father-now suffering from the advanced stages of alcoholism-proved futile. In 1866, however, Grahame was removed from this pastoral setting when his grandmother was forced to move far from the Thames. Following the death of his mother, Bessie, from scarlet fever in 1864, Grahame's father sent him and his siblings to live with their maternal grandmother in The Mount in Cookham Dene, near both the River Thames and Windsor Forest, and it was here that Grahame first reveled in a new-found world of English meadow and riverbank. Grahame was born on March 8, 1859, in Edinburgh, Scotland, and spent the first five years of his life with his family in the Western Highlands near Loch Fyne. In addition, it has been adapted for film, television, and the stage many times and inspired several unofficial sequels written by different authors. Both a social critique of the English class system and a utopian vision of an ideal bachelor society, The Wind in the Willows remains one of the most popular books for children in England and the United States and has been translated into several different languages. Originating from a series of bedtime stories Grahame told his son, Alastair, the book chronicles the adventures of a group of plucky anthropomorphic animals, led by the impulsive and childish Mr. ![]() ![]() Published in 1908, The Wind in the Willows is regarded as a classic juvenile novel and one of the best known works of children's literature. For further information on his life and career, see CLR, Volume 5. The following entry presents commentary on Kenneth Grahame's juvenile novel The Wind in the Willows (1908) through 2006. Scottish novelist, essayist, editor, and author of fairy tales, juvenile short stories, and juvenile novels.
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