Children’s Authors

What do a teacher, a journalist, an artist, a pilot and a mathematics professor have in common? They all became famous British children’s authors. The teacher was Enid Blyton and she started writing in her spare time. Her stories were often about a group of children and a dog, who visited a different part of the country in each book and had an adventure or solved a mystery like The Famous Five and The Secret Seven. She wrote at least 6,000 words a day and published over 600 books in her life. The journalist A.A. Milne was best known for his two books of stories about the lovable bear Winnie-the-Pooh. There was only one child in his stories, who was actually based on his son, Christopher Robin, before he went to school. The other “people” were either animals or toys. Artist Beatrix Potter wrote her books about the animals she saw near her country home and she also drew all the pictures for the stories. She gave the animals names, and with the first book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, she also had the idea of selling a doll and a game. Roald Dahl wrote about his adventures as a pilot, but his most popular stories happened to a boy or a girl who met horrible children and adults, or strange animals. Dahl often gave his characters funny names, like Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But the maths professor wrote the strangest stories of all. Lewis Carroll’s two books are about a girl called Alice who meets unusual animals and people in a dream world. Adults enjoy the books as much as children, perhaps because Carroll loved to play with the meanings of words. An original copy of the first book sold for $1.5 million a century after it was first published.