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Children's Favorites - Volume III - The Wizard of Oz - The Reluctant Dragon - Five Children and It

By L. Frank Baum & Kenneth Grahame &
Children's Favorites - Volume III - The Wizard of Oz - The Reluctant Dragon - Five Children and It by L. Frank Baum & Kenneth Grahame &  digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

Presented here are three of the most popular children's books of all time: L. Frank Baum's "The Wizard of Oz," Kenneth Grahame's "The Reluctant Dragon" and Edith Nesbit's "Five Children and It."  


First, one of the great classics of children's literature, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," which tells the story of young Dorothy, who is caught up in a cyclone and transported to the magical kingdom of Oz. In order to return home, Dorothy is instructed to travel to the City of Emeralds and ask the Wizard who rules there for his help in getting back to Kansas. Along the way, Dorothy befriends a strange group of traveling companions - a Scarecrow, a Tin Woodsman and a cowardly Lion - who are all in need of the Wizard's assistance. Thus begins this magical and wonderful journey into a world of unmatched imagination and creativity; a work that inspired no less than thirteen sequels and innumerable film, stage and television adaptations.


Then, the magical tale of an unlikely friendship between a boy and a dragon, Kenneth Grahame's beautiful and hilarious "The Reluctant Dragon." The main character, known only as "The Boy," discovers a friendly dragon living outside his small village. When the townspeople recruit St. George himself to slay the monster, the Boy to attempts to intervene and try to save his friend. It is a sweet, uplifting fable of love and friendship for children of all ages.


And finally, Edith Nesbit's classic "Five Children and It," which revolves around five young children - Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane, and their baby brother the Lamb - who discover a lumpy, grumpy sand-fairy (also known as a Psammead) who agrees to grant the children one wish every day, but warns them that the wishes will "turn to stone" at sunset. The rest of the story concerns the various wishes each of the children requests...and how terribly they go wrong.


Each of these stories is presented here in its original and unabridged format..Enjoy ALL THREE of these classic children's novels in ONE VOLUME! This is the third of a limited series.

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About L. Frank Baum

L. Frank Baum was born Lyman Frank Baum on May 15, 1856, the seventh of nine children of Benjamin and Cynthia Ann Baum. Baum's father was enormously successful and Lyman grew up on the family's huge estate - Rose Lawn- in Pennsylvania. Interested in writing from an early age, he managed to persuade his father to purchase a cheap printing press which he and his brother Harry used to produce a local journal, the Rose Lawn Home Journal. But his early love was the theatre and as a young man, Baum performed often as "Louis F. Baum" and "George Brooks." Eventually, his father bought him a theater in Richburg, NY where he wrote scripts and gathered a company together to perform them. While on tour with one of his plays, the Richburg theater burned to the ground, along with the only known copies of Baum's scripts. In 1882, Baum married Maud Gage and moved to the Dakota Territory, where he failed in business as a store owner. His literary "Kansas" was said to be based on his time in drought-ridden South Dakota. Baum continued writing, achieving moderate success with his book "Mother Goose in Prose" in 1897. But in 1900, he published "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," which became a phenomenon. He would eventually write thirteen additional Oz books and brought "The Wizard of Oz" to the stage as well, where it ran on Broadway and toured America. Baum never stopped writing and, upon his death following a stroke in 1919, Baum had completed 41 novels (apart from the Oz books), 83 short stories, 200 poems at at least 42 scripts. He is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

Kenneth Grahame

Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. After the untimely death of their mother when Grahame and his three siblings were very young, Grahame's father - who had a drinking problem - gave his four children over to their grandmother to raise, where they lived in a huge, rundown house called "The Mount" in Berkshire. The house was very near the Thames River and the children became acquainted with river life and boating through their uncle, David Ingles, the curate at Cookham Dean church. After the chimney collapsed at The Mount during Christmas of 1865, the family moved to Fern Hill Cottage in Cranbourne, Berkshire. Following a failed attempt to reunite the children with their father in 1866, the children returned to live with their grandmother again until they each entered school. Kenneth started at St Edward's School, Oxford, in 1868. Thwarted from attending Oxford University due to the high cost, Grahame began work at the Bank of England and rose to become Secretary of the Bank until his retirement due to ill-health in 1908, the same year The Wind and the Willows was published. Grahame married Elspeth Thomson in 1899, when he was 40 years old. The following year, Elspeth gave birth to their only child, Alastair (nicknamed "Mouse"), we was born premature, blind in one eye and who suffered from severe health problems all his life. To comfort the often bedridden child, Grahame began making up bedtime stories, eventually spinning elaborate tales about the denizens of his countryside adventures, featuring the characters of Mole, Rat, Badger and Toad. Though he published two fairly successful books of short stories prior to 1908 - including The Reluctant Dragon in 1898 - it was not until the release of The Wind in the Willows that Grahame received international acclaim. Since then, the story has been adapted multiple times to the stage and screen and still enjoys a wide popularity as one of the finest children's books ever written. Grahame died in 1932.

Edith Nesbit

Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) was an English writer and poet who write over 60 children's books under the name "E. Nesbit" including "The Railway Children," "Five Children and It" (the first book in the Psammead Series), "The Story of the Treasure Seekers," (part of the Bastable Series) as well as two books comprising the House of Arden series.Nesbit's father John died when she was very young and the poor health of her sister Mary caused the family to travel a great deal to treat Mary's illnesses. The family settled in Halstead Hall in northwest Kent (a location that inspired The Railway Children) after Mary's death from tuberculosis in 1871.Nesbit met the bank clerk Hubert Bland in 1877 and by 1880 she had become pregnant by him and the couple were wed in April of that year. Bland's infidelities (and subsequent out-of-wedlock children with other women) made their marriage a rocky one, but they managed to have four children and remained together until Bland's death in 1914. Nesbit then married Thomas "the Skipper" Tucker, captain of the Woolwich Ferry, in 1917 and remained with him for the rest of her life. Nesbit succumbed to lung cancer in 1924.Nesbit, who also helped found the left-wing Fabian Society and pushed for democratic socialist causes, was a popular and influential writer for her entire career and inspired many of the greatest children's authors of all time, including C.S. Lewis, P.L. Travers and J.K. Rowling. Her writing was not limited to children's books, however. Nesbit also wrote eleven adult novels, a number of short stories and no less than four collections of horror stories.Edith Nesbit is buried in the churchyard of St. Mary in the Marsh in Kent.

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