Kenneth Grahame was born in Edinburgh. After his mother died he was sent, at five, to live with his grandmother in a large old house by the Thames at Cookham Dean, and the river and its banks stayed with him all his life. He wanted to go to Oxford, but his family could not pay, and he became a clerk at the Bank of England.

He rose to be the bank's Secretary, and wrote essays and books about childhood in his spare time. The Wind in the Willows grew out of bedtime stories and letters to his only son, Alastair. Reviewers were puzzled by it in 1908, but readers were not, and it has never been out of print.