Puffin Classics Books

Carlo Collodi (Carlo Lorenzini) was a children’s writer born in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and writer of the world-renowned fairy tale novel The Adventures of Pinocchio.

Rudyard Kipling was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. Kipling’s works of ction include the classic Just So Stories and The Jungle Book.

Jack Griffith London was a California-based writer in the late 1800s and early 1900s. He is most well known stories are the classics The Call of the Wild and White Fang.

Roger Lancelyn Green (1918-1987) was a biographer of children’s writers and a reteller of myths, legends and fairy tales. He was a member of the Oxford literary group the Inklings, along with J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.Walter Crane (1845-1915) designed and illustrated the first successful series of mass-produced color books of high quality. The series began in 1863 and for the next thirty years Crane was pre-eminent as an illustrator. In addition to book illustration, he designed textiles, wallpaper and tapestries, and was a prominent member of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

Often referred to as the father of English poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer was a fourteenth-century philosopher, alchemist, astrologer, bureaucrat, diplomat, and author of many significant poems. Chaucer’s writing was influential in English literary tradition, as it introduced new rhyming schemes and helped develop the vernacular tradition–the use of everyday English–rather than the literary French and Latin, which were common in written works of the time. Chaucer’s best-known–and most imitated–works include The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, The Book of the Duchess, and The House of Fame.

Louisa May Alcott, born in 1832, was the second child of Bronson Alcott of Concord, Massachusetts, a self-taught philosopher, school reformer, and utopian who was much too immersed in the world of ideas to ever succeed in supporting his family. That task fell to his wife and later to his enterprising daughter Louisa May. While her father lectured, wrote, and conversed with such famous friends as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, Louisa taught school, worked as a seamstress and nurse, took in laundry, and even hired herself out as a domestic servant at age nineteen. The small sums she earned often kept the family from complete destitution, but it was through her writing that she finally brought them financial independence. “I will make a battering-ram of my head,” she wrote in her journal, “and make a way through this rough-and-tumble world.”