Standard Ebooks

Wild Animals I Have Known

Ernest Thompson Seton

Description

Wild Animals I Have Known, a collection of short stories published in 1898, was Ernest Thompson Seton’s most popular work and one of the most popular fiction books of its day.

The stories are largely independent of each other, with each one following the life of a different animal. They explore themes of survival in a world populated by humans and other creatures, and the challenges that each animal faces in its efforts to thrive. Each story touches on the duality between the beauty and brutality of the natural world. The collection as a whole illustrates recurring themes of triumph and tragedy, while painting a picture of the great freedom and grave danger that animals face every day of their lives.

In his 1903 essay “Real and Sham Natural History,” naturalist John Burroughs blamed this book in particular for founding the genre of stories he called “Nature Fakers,” sparking a controversy that raged for years and only ended when President Theodore Roosevelt publicly sided with Burroughs in September 1907.

While the book’s anthropomorphization of animals through Seton’s use of English words to represent the animals’ “language” was one of the characteristics at the center of its controversy, Wild Animals I Have Known was among the first literary works written with the intent to evoke a sense of empathy, rather than fear, for these wild animals, by showing that even for predators, survival in the wild is never easy.

Read free

This ebook is thought to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. It may still be under copyright in other countries. If you’re not located in the United States, you must check your local laws to verify that this ebook is free of copyright restrictions in the country you’re located in before accessing, downloading, or using it.

Download for ereaders

Read online

A brief history of this ebook

  1. Finish metadata and initial publication

  2. [Editorial] Modernize spelling

  3. Tweak CSS

  4. Flesh out the long description

  5. Added word joiner character before em dashes

More details

Sources

Transcriptions

Page scans

Improve this ebook

Anyone can contribute to make a Standard Ebook better for everyone!

To report typos, typography errors, or other corrections, see how to report errors.

If you’re comfortable with technology and want to contribute directly, check out this ebook’s GitHub repository and our contributors section.

You can also donate to Standard Ebooks to help fund continuing improvement of this and other ebooks.