Peter and Wendy
A boy who refuses to grow up flies into a nursery and takes three children to an island where pirates, fairies and lost boys live in a state of permanent adventure. Barrie wrote the play first, and the novel version keeps the theatrical machinery while adding a narrator who comments on the action.
The book is stranger and sadder than the Disney version. Barrie is interested in what adults have forgotten and in the price children pay for adventure. The narrator's jokes about mothers and death are not incidental; they are the reason the story has lasted.
Public-domain status
First published in 1911. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; J. M. Barrie died in 1937, so this work has been free to republish there since 2008.
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Keep reading
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll, 1865
- The Jungle Book — Rudyard Kipling, 1894
- Seven Little Australians — Ethel Turner, 1894
- The Wind in the Willows — Kenneth Grahame, 1908
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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