Kenneth Grahame: Facts About the Author of the Wind in the Willows

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Kenneth Grahame: Facts About the Author of the Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame: Facts About the Author of The Wind in the Willows Here are some facts about Kenneth Grahame. • Kenneth Grahame was born at 32 Castle Street in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 8 March 1859. • His mother died of scarlet fever when he was five, and Kenneth Grahame, his two brothers and his sister went to live in Berkshire with his grandmother, Granny Ingles. • It was at Cookham Dean in Berkshire that Kenneth’s uncle, David Ingles, took him boating. The experience of spending time on the river Thames and exploring the riverside is thought to have inspired the setting for The Wind in the Willows. • After he left school, Kenneth Grahame worked at the Bank of England. • He married Elspeth Thomson in 1899. They had one son, called Alastair. Unfortunately, Alastair was killed by a train just before his twentieth birthday. • Kenneth Grahame’s first stories were published in London periodicals, and in the 1890s he published three collections of stories, Pagan Papers, The Golden Age and Dream Days. • The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame’s most famous and well-loved work, was published in 1908. • The character of Toad from the The Wind in the Willows was based on his son (a young boy at the time). Ratty was inspired by his good friend Sir Arthur Quiller- Couch. • Kenneth Grahame died in 1932 in Pangbourne, aged 73, Berkshire. He was buried in the same grave as his son, Alastair. • William Horwood wrote a series of sequels to The Wind in the Willows in the 1990s. • The Wind in the Willows has been adapted for TV, film and stage on numerous occasions. What next? Discover some facts about other famous authors .
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    good john © good john © good john © good john © good john © john © good good john © john © good good good john good john © john good © © john good good © john good good good © john john good good © Kenneth Grahame john © john good good © john enneth Grahame was born on a cold © K Edinburgh morning in 1859, the third child and second son of Cunningham and up a steady stream of stories which were destined to john Bessie Grahame. His mother died young One of Kenneth Grahame’s original letters to ‘Mouse’ influence her grandson throughout his life. of scarlet fever in 1864. Kenneth was also goodCunningham Grahame was unable to cope with his ill and it was his grandmother who © four young children and they werenursed sent to him live backwith to health and kept relatives at a rambling old house with large grounds in john Berkshire. Adults rarely came into their lives and the good most important influence on Kenneth was the natural © world. He was always, like Mole, ‘bewitched, entranced, fascinated’ by the wonders of nature, and it is these john two idyllic years of his childhood which he recreates in his later books The Golden Age and Dream Days, both written from the child’s pointgood of view. Later, he was to England, preferring to remain an ‘amateur’ writer. It was admit, ‘The queer thing is, I can remember everything I at the Bank of England that ©he met Elspeth Thomson felt then, the part of my brain I used from four till about in 1897 when she was thirty-five and he thirty-eight.
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