Seventeenth-century Frenchman Jean de La Fontaine happily plundered Aesop and other classical writers as a source for his witty, elegant fables, as well as inventing a number of his own. Seeking to expose the weaknesses of human nature, he offered vivid perspectives on greed and flattery, envy and avarice, love and friendship, old age and death. The sixty fables collected here - from 'The Crow and the Fox' and 'The Cock and the Pearl' to 'The Grasshopper and the Ant' and 'The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse' - are illustrated with more than a hundred drawings by R. de La Neziere which which charmingly capture La Fontaine's unforgettable cast of animal personalities.

 

This book is part of a book series called Everymans Library Childrens Classics .

There are 160 pages in this book. This book was published 2001 by Everyman .

Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695) was born at Chateau-Thierry in the Champagne region of France, and is probably the most widely-read French poet of the seventeenth century. He counted Racine and Moliere among his close friends and was elected to the Academie Francaise in 1684. His Fables, the first of six books of which was published in 1668, were a great success, and continue to be taught widely in French schools. AESOP probably lived in the middle part of the sixth century BC. A statement in Herodotus gives grounds for thinking that he was a slave.