Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame - Juanita Price (essay date 25 January 1988)

Juanita Price (essay date 25 January 1988)

SOURCE: Price, Juanita. “Kenneth Grahame's Creation of a Wild Wood.” AB Bookman's Weekly 81 (25 January 1988): 265-71.

[In the following essay, Price traces the origins of The Wind in the Willows.]

One of this century's beloved children's books, popular on both sides of the Atlantic, originated in a series of letters the author wrote to his young son.

What Kenneth Grahame wrote as The Wind in the Willows was a single work of the highest artistry to which any child or adult can return at different times and derive fresh aesthetic joy and revelation. His book is one by which a reader can measure a part of himself—that part which has an affinity with the natural world—with a certain style of writing, and with Grahame's insights into the absurdities and idiosyncrasies of human nature. (2:52) [References cited by number and page are listed in the bibliography at the end of this...

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