Great
Children’s
Books

The novella is both the most read and most translated book in the French language, and was voted the best book of the 20th century in France, maintaining sales of over one million copies per year worldwide. Translated into more than 250 languages and dialects, with sales totaling more than 200 million copies, it has become one of the best-selling books ever published.

An earlier memoir by the author recounted his aviation experiences in the Sahara desert. He is thought to have drawn on those same experiences for use as plot elements in The Little Prince. The novella has been adapted to various media over the decades, including audio recordings, stage, screen, ballet and operatic works.

Though ostensibly a children’s book, The Little Prince makes several profound and idealistic observations about life and human nature. For example, Saint-Exupéry tells of a fox meeting the young prince during his travels on Earth. The story’s essence is contained in the lines uttered by the fox to the little prince: “One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” Other key thematic messages are articulated by the fox, such as: “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed” and “It is the time you have devoted to your rose that makes your rose so important.”

All of the novella’s simple but elegant watercolour illustrations, which were integral to the story, were painted by Saint-Exupéry.

The hyphens in the character’s name were later dropped when The Walt Disney Company adapted the Pooh stories into a series of Disney features that became one of its most successful franchises.

Milne named the character Winnie-the-Pooh after a teddy bear owned by his son, Christopher Robin Milne, who was the basis for the character Christopher Robin. Christopher’s toys also lent their names to most of the other characters, except for Owl and Rabbit, as well as the Gopher character, who was added in the Disney version.

The Winnie-the-Pooh stories are set in Ashdown Forest, Sussex, England. The forest is a large area of tranquil open heathland on the highest sandy ridges of the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty situated 30 miles (50 km) south of London.

Many locations in the stories can be linked to real places in and around the forest. As Christopher Milne wrote in his autobiography: “Pooh’s forest and Ashdown Forest are identical”. The landscapes depicted in E.H. Shepard’s illustrations for the Winnie-the-Pooh books are directly inspired by the distinctive landscape of Ashdown Forest, with its high, open heathlands of heather, gorse, bracken and silver birch punctuated by hilltop clumps of pine trees.

The first collection of Pooh stories appeared in the book Winnie-the-Pooh. The Evening News Christmas story reappeared as the first chapter of the book, and at the very beginning it explained that Pooh was in fact Christopher Robin’s Edward Bear, who had simply been renamed by the boy. The book was published in October 1926 by the publisher of Milne’s earlier children’s work, Methuen, in England, and E. P. Dutton in the United States.

Since 1966, Disney has released numerous animated productions starring Winnie the Pooh and related characters. These have included theatrical featurettes, television series, and direct-to-video films, as well as the theatrical feature-length films The Tigger Movie, Piglet’s Big Movie, Pooh’s Heffalump Movie, and Winnie the Pooh.

Winnie the Pooh has inspired multiple texts to explain complex philosophical ideas. Pooh has also left a legacy in popular culture.

Kindle:

Greek myth attempts to explain the origins of the world, and details the lives and adventures of a wide variety of gods, goddesses, heroes, heroines, and mythological creatures. These accounts initially were disseminated in an oral-poetic tradition; today the Greek myths are known primarily from Greek literature.

The oldest known Greek literary sources, the epic poems Iliad and Odyssey, focus on events surrounding the Trojan War. Two poems by Homer’s near contemporary Hesiod, the Theogony and the Works and Days, contain accounts of the genesis of the world, the succession of divine rulers, the succession of human ages, the awesome origin of human woes, and the origin of sacrificial practices. Myths also are preserved in the Homeric Hymns, in fragments of epic poems of the Epic Cycle, in lyric poems, in the works of the tragedians of the fifth century BC, in writings of scholars and poets of the Hellenistic Age and in texts from the time of the Roman Empire by writers such as Plutarch and Pausanias.

Greek mythology has exerted an extensive influence on the culture, the arts, and the literature of Western civilization and remains part of Western heritage and language. Poets and artists from ancient times to the present have derived inspiration from Greek mythology and have discovered contemporary significance and relevance in these mythological themes. 

Aesop’s Fables or the Aesopica are a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and story-teller believed to have lived in ancient Greece. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Aesop lived in Ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BCE.

The modern view is that Aesop probably did not solely compose all those fables attributed to him, if he even existed at all. Modern scholarship reveals fables and proverbs of “Aesopic” form existing in both ancient Sumer and Akkad, as early as the third millennium BCE.

The fables remain a popular choice for moral education of children today. Many of the stories, such as The Fox and the Grapes (from which the idiom “sour grapes” derives), The Tortoise and the Hare, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, The Ant and the Grasshopper, and The North Wind and the Sun, are well-known throughout the world.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the Brothers Grimm, were German academics, cultural researchers and authors who lived in the XVIII and XIX century. During their lifetime they collected folklore and in 1812 published a collection of German origin fairy tales called Children’s and Household Tales commonly known today as Grimms’ Fairy Tales (German: Grimms Märchen).

The first collection of fairy tales contained more than 200 fairy tales. Some collections of the stories had been previously written by Charles Perrault in the late 1600s. In the original published forms, the Grimm’s fairy tales were dark and violent, in contrast to the lighter, modern “Disney versions” of those tales.

They are among the best-known story tellers of European folk tales, and their work popularized such stories as “Cinderella” , “Hansel and Gretel”, “Sleeping Beauty”,  ”Rapunzel”, “Snow White”,  ”The Frog Prince”,  and “Rumpelstiltskin”.

Popular in the English world as Arabian Nights, One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. The first edition in English is from 1706.

This collection as we know it today came in this form after many centuries and works by various authors, translators and scholars across the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa. Most of the stories trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Indian, Turkish, Egyptian and Mesopotamian folklore and literature. In particular, many tales were originally folk stories from the Caliphate era, while others, especially the frame story, are most probably drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hazār Afsān (A Thousand Tales) which in turn relied partly on Indian elements.

It is also notable that the innovative and rich poetry and poetic speeches, songs, chants, hymns, beseeching, lamentations, praising, pleading, riddles and annotations provided by Scheherazade or her story characters are unique to the Arabic version of the book. Some are as short as one line, while others go for tens of lines.

Some of the stories of The Nights, particularly “Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp”, “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” and “The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor”, while almost certainly genuine Middle-Eastern folk tales, were not part of The Nights in Arabic versions, but were interpolated into the collection by Antoine Galland and other European translators.