By the late 1890s Kenneth Grahame had established his reputation in England and in the United States as an essayist. In 1898, at the age of thirty-nine, he further distinguished himself by becoming the youngest person to be commissioned secretary of the Bank of England, one of the three top positions in the bank. At this point he surprisingly, but decisively, retired from writing essays, explaining simply that it was his choice to spend more time out-of-doors. Almost by accident several years later he wrote the book on which his current reputation rests--The Wind in the Willows (1908), one of the best-known children's classics in the English language. He retired from the Bank of England in 1907 at the age of forty-eight, and though he lived to be seventy-three, he wrote no more books.

Several of Grahame's themes remained constant in both his fiction and nonfiction: the nature of childhood...