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Arthur Ransome Biography
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. 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 where he developed sympathy for the cause of Leon Trotsky and the Russian Revolution, and met his second wife, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina, who was Trotsky's secretary. Upon his return to England, he published Old Peter's Russian Tales, a collection of 21 folktales from Russia, which was his main source of fame until Swallows and Amazons.

'Swallows and Amazons' Bibliography
Swallows and Amazons (published 1930)
Swallowdale (1931)
Peter Duck (1932)
Winter Holiday (1933)
Coot Club (1934)
Pigeon Post (1936)
We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea (1937)
Secret Water (1939)
The Big Six (1940)
Missee Lee (1941)
The Picts And The Martyrs (1943)
Great Northern? (1947)
Coots in the North (unfinished at the time of his death, published in the 1990s)
 
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Arthur Ransome.