Books by Arthur Ransome

Arthur Ransome (January 18, 1884�June 3, 1967) is best known for writing the Swallows and Amazons series of children's books, which tell of school-holiday adventures of teen-age children, mostly in the Lake District and Norfolk Broads areas of England, and mostly involving small sailing boats. They remain popular to the point that they are a basis of a tourist industry around Lake Windermere and Coniston Water - the two lakes that Ransome used as the basis for his fictional lake.

Earlier in his life, Ransom was a newspaper reporter, writing mainly for the famous Manchester Guardian (now the Guardian). He wrote about 30 nonfiction books on topics ranging from Oscar Wilde to Russia before gaining success with the Swallows and Amazons series.

In 1913 he visited Russia to study folk lore. In 1916, he published Old Peter's Russian Tales, a collection of 21 folktales from Russia. After the start of World War I he became a reporter and covered the war on the Eastern Front. He also covered the revolutions in 1917 and developed some sympathy for the Bolshevik cause and its leaders Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky and met his second wife, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina, who was Trotsky's secretary. After the war he remained in the Baltic states and learned to sail. He wrote Racundra's First Cruise, about his sailing. He then returned to England and settled in the Lake District where he wrote Swallows and Amazons in 1929. A trip to China as a foreign correspondent provided an imaginative springboard for Missee Lee, in which some of the S&A children hang out with a female pirate. The eventual success of his children's books enabled him to give up reporting.