Author Grahame Kenneth

was shot at three times, all of them missed.[2] Grahame married Elspeth Thomson in 1899, but the marriage was not a happy one. They had only one child, a boy named Alastair (whose nickname was "Mouse") born blind in one eye and plagued by health problems throughout his short life. Alastair eventually committed suicide on a railway track while an undergraduate at Oxford University, two days before his 20th birthday on 7 May 1920.[3] Out of respect for Kenneth Grahame, Alastair's demise was recorded as an accidental death. Kenneth Grahame died in Pangbourne, Berkshire in 1932. He is buried in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford, near the grave of the American expatriate author James Blish. Grahame's cousin Anthony Hope, also a successful author, wrote his epitaph, which reads: "To the beautiful memory of Kenneth Grahame, husband of Elspeth and father of Alastair, who passed the river on the 6th of July, 1932, leaving childhood and literature through him the more blest for all time".[4] While still a young man, Grahame began to publish light stories in London periodicals such as the St. James Gazette. Some of these stories were collected and published as Pagan Papers in 1893, and, two years later, The Golden Age. These were followed by Dream Days in 1898, which contains The Reluctant Dragon. There is a ten-year gap between Grahame's penultimate book and the publication of his triumph, The Wind in the Willows. During this decade Grahame became a father. The wayward headstrong nature he saw in his little son Alistair (also known as "Mouse") he transformed into the swaggering Mr. Toad, one of its four principal characters. Despite its success, he never attempted a sequel; in the 1990s William Horwood began writing a series of sequels. The book was a hit and is still enjoyed by adults and children today, whether in book form or in the films, while Toad remains one of the most celebrated and beloved characters of the book. Find more about Kenneth Grahame on Wikipedia's sister projects: