altivo

How many of the older adventure stories involved animals, either as companions or characters of a sort? I'm referring here to natural animals, not fantasy animals who wear clothing and live in houses, but animals whose forms we would recognize as perfectly normal, yet they reasoned and in many cases spoke as if they were human to some degree.

Here are a few authors that came to mind today after I started thinking about the first of them:

James Oliver Curwood: wrote several novels in which various animals were primary characters whose thoughts and feelings were revealed, including Kazan, Baree, and The Grizzly King. The last was made into a film called The Bear just a few years ago.
Jack London: was author of The Call of the Wild and White Fang.
Anna Sewell: wrote Black Beauty to promote more humane attitudes toward working horses.
Marshall Saunders: was the author of Beautiful Joe, which sought to do for dogs that Sewell did for horses.
Mark Twain: published two short stories later in his life, "A Dog's Tale" and "A Horse's Tale," that highlighted issues similar to those discussed by Sewell and Saunders.
Edgar Rice Burroughs: in his Tarzan series presented thinking rational animals, some of whom had their own languages.
Rudyard Kipling: The Jungle Book and Just So Stories.
Felix Salten: was the author of Bambi and Perri, both of which were eventually made famous by Disney adaptations.
Albert Payson Terhune: wrote many dog stories, most of them about collies. Lad: a Dog is probably the best known of them.

I'm cutting off my list somewhere around World War II, though there are many later authors who created remarkable animal characters. What other authors can you add, who wrote prior to about 1940? I contend that these authors are the fathers and mothers of modern furry fiction, and all of them are worthy of study and emulation to some degree. None of these authors were writing for children, though most of the works mentioned here are today shrugged off as children's stories.