Adventure and animals

[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.

Comments

[equusmaximus.livejournal.com]

I'm fortunate enough to own a copy of "The Complete and Unabridged Gulliver's Travels." I got it when I was quite young, and it wasn't until I was a young adult that I was truly able to appreciate it. I re-read it a few years ago, and got a lot more meaning and enjoyment out of it.

(well, phoot... This was supposed to be a reply to the little sub-thread about Gulliver's Travels, ah well... onward!)

All of my books are currently in storage, and names and faces have never been my speciality, so you'll have to forgive my forgetting the authors. Still two classic Animal Stories that immediately came to mind were "Where the Red Fern Grows" and "The Yearling". Although it's much too recent (in the 1980's) for your pre-WWII requirement, Robert Adam's "The Horse Clans" series was a favourite of mine. What about "Old Yeller"?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

My recollections of The Yearling and Old Yeller do not include any presentation of the animals' point of view, thoughts, emotions, etc. so I think they fall outside my target here. I've never read Where the Red Fern Grows so I don't know about that and will check.