Enid Blyton

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Enid Blyton bigraphy, stories - English children's novelist

Enid Blyton : biography

11 August 1897 – 28 November 1968

Enid Mary Blyton (11 August 1897 – 28 November 1968) was a British children’s writer also known as Mary Pollock.

She is noted for numerous series of popular books based on recurring characters and designed for different age groups. Her books have enjoyed huge success in many parts of the world, and have sold over 600 million copies. This index contains titles in all the translated languages. The top five are: Walt Disney Productions, Agatha Christie, Jules Verne, Shakespeare, Enid Blyton, and the next five: Vladimir Lenin, Dame Barbara Cartland, Danielle Steel, Hans Christian Andersen, and Stephen King

One of Blyton’s most widely known characters is Noddy, intended for early years readers. However, her main work is the genre of young readers’ novels in which children have their own adventures with minimal adult help. Series of this type include The Famous Five (21 novels, 1942–1963, based on four children and their dog), The Five Find-Outers and Dog (15 novels, 1943–1961, where five children regularly solve crimes before the local police), as well as The Secret Seven (15 novels, 1949–1963, a society of seven children who solve various mysteries). She also wrote some lesser known poems and books.

Her work involves children’s adventure stories, and fantasy, sometimes involving magic. Her books were and still are enormously popular throughout the Commonwealth and across most of the globe. Her work has been translated into nearly 90 languages and her literary output was of an estimated 800 books over roughly 40 years.

Chorion Limited of London owned and handled the intellectual properties and character brands of Blyton’s estate but following financial difficulties in 2012, sold its assets. Hachette UK acquired world rights in the Blyton estate in March 2013, including The Famous Five series.http://www.thebookseller.com/news/hachette-snaps-blyton-estate.html and Noddy was sold to DreamWorks Classics (formerly Classic Media, now a subsidiary of DreamWorks Animation)http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/classic-media-noddy-rights-chorion-297387?newsfeed=true in 2012.

Controversies and revisions

Enid Blyton’s status as a bestselling author is in spite of disapproval of her works from various perspectives, which has led to altered reprints of the books and withdrawals or “bans” from libraries. In the 1990s, Chorion, the owners of Blyton’s works, edited her books to remove passages that were deemed racist or sexist.Geoghegan, Tom.. BBC News Magazine. 5 September 2008. The children’s author Anne Fine presented an overview of the concerns about Blyton’s work and responses to them on BBC Radio 4 in November 2008, in which she noted the "drip, drip, drip of disapproval" associated with the books.Fine, Anne. . BBC Radio 4. 27 November 2008.

"Blyton bans"

It was frequently reported (in the 1950s and also from the 1980s onwards) that various children’s libraries removed some of Blyton’s works from the shelves. The history of such "Blyton bans" is confused. Some librarians certainly at times felt that Blyton’s restricted use of language, a conscious product of her teaching background, militated against appreciation of more literary qualities. There was some precedent in the treatment of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books (and the many sequels by others) by librarians in the United States in the 1930s. There were numerous critical comments about Blyton: claiming that her vocabulary was too limited, that she presented too rosy a view of the world, even suggestions that little Noddy’s relationship with Big Ears was "suspect", that he was a poor role model for boys because he sometimes wept when frustrated and the laws were politically incorrect.

A careful account of anti-Blyton attacks is given in Chapter 4 of Robert Druce’s This Day Our Daily Fictions. The British Journal of Education in 1955 carried a piece by Janice Dohn, an American children’s librarian, considering Blyton’s writing together with authors of formula fiction, and making negative comments about Blyton’s devices and tone. A 1958 article in Encounter by Colin Welch, directed against the Noddy character, was reprinted in a New Zealand librarians’ periodical. This gave rise to the first rumour of a New Zealand "library ban" on Blyton’s books, a recurrent press canard. Policy on buying and stocking Blyton’s books by British public libraries drew attention in newspaper reports from the early 1960s to the end of the 1970s, as local decisions were made by a London borough, Birmingham, Nottingham and other central libraries.