Signs of biographies of British and American writers in their books

Мария Каркани, 6в класс

Signs of biographies of British and American writers in their books

A.A. MILNE AND HIS WINNIE-THE-POOH

The story of Winnie-the-Pooh, one of the most loved characters in the history of children's literature, began when a toy bear was gifted by writer A.A. Milne to Christopher Robin, his son , on his first birthday, August 21, 1921.

A.A. Milne started to write a series of books about Winnie the Pooh, his son Christopher Robin, and their friends in the Hundred Acre Wood. Almost all the characters in his books had real-life counterparts. Christopher Robin, Pooh's human companion, was named after Milne's own son, Christopher Robin Milne.

The other characters, such as Eeyore, Piglet, Tigger, Kanga and Roo were also based on stuffed animals belonging to Christopher Robin. The characters, Rabbit and Owl, were based on animals that lived in the surrounding area of Milne's country house, in Ashdown Forest, Sussex. And the Hundred Acre Wood closely resembles Ashdown Forest where the Milnes had a nearby home.

Author AA Milne and his son Christopher Robin were frequent visitors to the London Zoo. Boy’s favorite animal at the Zoo was a bear called 'Winnipeg' or 'Winnie' for short. Christopher Robin, like many children, loved Winnie because of her exceptionally friendly nature. He often spent time inside the cage with it and decided to rename his stuffed bear from Edward to Winnie. And so did A.A. Milne, calling his character Winnie the Pooh, where the name Pooh originally belonged to a swan that also lived in the surrounding area of Milne’s country house as Milne later said.

Today the original toys that inspired Milne can still be seen at the New York Public Library. All except Roo, he was lost in the 1930s.

 With his stories about the magical world of Pooh Bear, Milne brought joy into lives of many people. Once his Winnie the Pooh books arrived on the scene, Milne’s name was forever associated with children’s writing. His other works are largely forgotten.

MARK TWAIN AND HIS TOM SAWYER

)The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, first published in 1876, is a child's adventure story written by Mark Twain , one of America’s most beloved humorists and storytellers.

Twain based The Adventures of Tom Sawyer largely on his personal memories of growing up in Hannibal in the 1840s. In his preface to the novel, he states that “most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred” and that the character of Tom Sawyer has a basis in “a combination . . . of three boys whom I knew.” Indeed, nearly every figure in the novel comes from the young Twain’s village experience: The story is set in an area in which Samuel Clemens, the real name of Mark Twain, grew up. A quiet town overlooking the Mississippi River is renamed St. Petersburg and is where all the characters live. Aunt Polly shares many characteristics with Twain’s mother; Mary is based on Twain’s sister Pamela and Sid resembles Twain’s younger brother, Henry Huck Finn, Widow Douglas, and even Injun Joe also have real-life counterparts, although the actual Injun Joe was more of a harmless drunk than a murderer.

The cave that was Joe’s hideout still exists. Twain’s town was surrounded by large forests which he himself knew as a child and in which his characters Tom Sawyer and Joe Harper often played “Indians and Chiefs”. To this day, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer remains perhaps the most popular and widely read of all Twain’s works.

TREASURE ISLAND BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

R.L. Stevenson was not a children’s writer but several of Stevenson's texts are written for children. Treasure Island (1883) was the first of these and it was begun as an entertainment for his twelve-year-old stepson Lloyd inspired by a map Stevenson had drawn with his stepson. Stevenson drew that map out of his imagination though he was inspired by some real events. And that is how Stevenson got started writing Treasure Island - as a back story to the map originally drawn by his stepson and himself.

Stevenson consciously borrowed material from previous authors. The author admitted that he took the idea of Captain Flint's skeleton point from Poe's "The Gold-Bug," and he constructed Billy Bones' history from the pages of Washington Irving, one of his favorite writers. Stevenson was inspired to create John Silver, his most memorable character and a fascinating, threatening pirate, by a family friend named William Ernest Henley who was also missing a leg. He himself certainly looked something like his pirate protagonists. He chose to wear his hair long, dress in velveteen jackets.  

Stevenson’s first major success, a tale of piracy, buried treasure, and adventure became a bestseller and without doubt has affected generations of boys and girls.

LEWIS CARROL AND HIS ALICE IN WONDERLAND

The man known as Lewis Carroll was really two people. Born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, he adopted Carroll as his pen name and wrote several novels including the now-beloved Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Mr. Dodgson was an English mathematician, photographer, logician, deacon and finally a writer.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland originated on a boat trip with the young Liddell sisters Lorina, Alice and Edith, ranging in age from eight to thirteen. Everyone in the boat was looking forward to the ride and picnic. “Tell us a story" was the prompt and it poured out, the story of Alice down the rabbit hole. Actually, the first Alice’s adventures were “Underground." Later the location turned into Wonderland.

He was a friend of the Liddell family for a long time. Charles often took the kids to picnics, where he told them fantastic stories and used them as subjects for his hobby as a photographer. He spent time with all the children, but his favorite, however, was Alice Liddell.

In 1932 Alice Liddell Hargreaves received an honorary doctorate from Columbia University in celebration of anniversary of Carroll’s birth acknowledging her as “the moving cause of this truly noteworthy contribution to English literature”.

When the novel was officially published, in 1865, the book was an instant success. Lewis Carroll soon became a well-known name around the world. Queen Victoria herself  was such a big fan of the book that she ordered Charles to dedicate the next book to her.

Carrol was always an extremely logical man. As in life, Carroll was extremely logical in his literature. He wrote many mathematical treatises, but also his novels were full of elements of logic such as cards, chess, and mirror reversals. The appearance of chess and croquet in Carroll’s writing is due to his own interest and participation in these activities.                 

CONAN DOYLE AND HIS SHERLOCK  HOLMES

Arthur Conan Doyle created one of the world's most famous characters, Sherlock Holmes. But in some ways the Scottish-born author felt trapped by the popularity of the fictional detective. He attended medical school at Edinburgh University where he met a professor and surgeon, Dr. Joseph Bell who was a model for Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle noticed how Dr. Bell was able to determine a great many facts about patients by asking seemingly simple questions, and the author later wrote about how Bell's manner had inspired the fictional detective. With 62 stories of the detective, it is the most numerous of Conan Doyle characters. Though Sherlock Holmes was the most popular. The character of Sherlock Holmes first appeared in a story, A Study in Scarlet. With the success of the Holmes stories, Conan Doyle was suddenly an extremely famous writer. But Conan Doyle always thought that his creature was obscuring the rest of his works, especially the historical novels, so he decided to kill him in 1893 at the end of the 26th story, The Adventure of the Final Problem. However, 8 years later, under family (they say, Conan Doyle's own mother, when told of the planned story, begged her son not to finish off Sherlock Holmes) and editor pressure, he brought the detective back to life in a story The Adventure of the empty house and wrote 34 more stories between 1901 and 1927.

DANIEL DEFOE AND HIS ROBINSON CRUSOE

Daniel Defoe helped to invent one of our most popular and important forms of literature: the novel.

Defoe was nearly sixty when his first novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719, appeared. He had been known to his contemporaries as a journalist and pamphleteer, however, long before he a writer. 

Often hailed as the first English novel, Robinson Crusoe has a story that will be familiar to many: that of the sailor Crusoe, who finds himself shipwrecked on a remote island and must carve an existence for himself out of the few resources that are available to him. Daniel Defoe based his tale on the experiences of the traveler Alexander Selkirk, who spent four years marooned on the Pacific island of Juan Fernandez in the early eighteenth century. Defoe made lots of changes to Selkirk's tale. He moved the island to the Caribbean and peopled it with cannibals, one of whom becomes Crusoe's faithful servant Friday. The adventures of Crusoe – his struggle to cultivate the land, his encounters with cannibals and mutineers, and his friendship with Man Friday – were hugely popular when the novel was first published, It is a story of survival, self-reliance, adventure, and faith. In this novel, Defoe captured extreme challenges to human existence and depicted how the individual thinks through difficulties and achieves success.

PAMELA TRAVERS AND HER MARY POPPINS

British author P. L. Travers, although the author of many writings for children and adults, was best known for her 1934 book Mary Poppins and its sequels. This fantasy, about a nanny with magical powers, became one of the great publishing successes of the twentieth century.

One day when Travers was ill she had to entertain two visiting children, and concocted a story for them about a nanny who carried her belongings in a carpetbag and had an umbrella with a parrot's head on the handle. This governess, Mary Poppins, came to Number 17 Cherry Tree Lane to care for the Banks children: Jane and Michael. Mary Poppins had magical powers, such as the ability to use an umbrella to fly in the sky. The story grew into the book Mary Poppins. 
The book was successful from the start, and Travers soon followed it with a sequel, Mary Poppins Comes Back (1935) The reason for the success of the Mary Poppins books is certainly the books' mixture of fantasy and everyday elements. The books also had deeper patterns of fantasy drawn from Travers's studies of myth and legend, and Travers never thought of them as being exclusively for children. When asked by interviewers later what had given her the idea for Mary Poppins, she sometimes said it seemed the character had always been with her.