Blyton, Enid

Blyton, Enid (1897-1968), author, b. Dulwich, London.

Enid Blyton trained as a teacher. In 1923 she published a collection of poems for children called Real Fairies and after this she began running a magazine for children called Sunny Stories. It was very popular, and some of the serials in it were later published as books.

Among her earliest books were The Adventures of the Wishing Chair (1937), The Enchanted Wood (1939) and Naughty Amelia Jane (1939) which are still on sale today.

Miss Blyton went on to write more than four hundred books. They included several series about particular characters such as the Famous Five, the Secret Seven and Noddy.

Noddy is the most famous of these. Millions of Noddy books have been sold. Miss Blyton is said to have been the most popular of all children's writers. Over 600 million copies of her books have been sold and they have been translated into 165 languages. That was more languages than Shakespeare's work had been translated into. Indeed, only Lenin's writings had appeared in more languages than Miss Blyton's.