Kenneth Grahame
1859–1932 · Scotland
Author of The Wind in the Willows
Kenneth Grahame was born in Edinburgh in 1859. After his mother died, he and his siblings lived with their grandmother in Cookham Dean, beside the Thames. He attended St Edward’s School in Oxford, but did not go to university. In 1879 he entered the Bank of England as a clerk, became its Secretary in 1898, and left in 1908.
Grahame published essays and stories before the books that established his name. Pagan Papers appeared in 1893, followed by The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898). The Wind in the Willows appeared in 1908, shortly after his resignation. Some of its episodes had first taken shape in letters to his son, Alastair, whom the family called Mouse. Grahame’s affection for river life and the landscape around Cookham Dean gives the book its movement between domestic rooms, roads and open water.
He married Elspeth Thomson in 1899. Their son died in 1920, after which Grahame withdrew from public literary life. He died in Pangbourne in 1932.