Children who inspired legends

These 10 literary masterpieces were inspired by real children

Peter Pan, Alice, Christopher Robin, and even the four March sisters have something in common: they wouldn’t exist today if real-life children hadn’t inspired 10 renowned writers to immortalize them. A restless girl on a rowboat, a 5-year-old stuck in bed with scarlet fever, or a 12-year-old with a box of watercolors and nothing to do on a rainy afternoon were some of them. Here are 10 stories of real kids behind the books we never forgot.

One day during the summer of 1862, three little girls in a rowboat helped change children's literature forever. Charles Dodgson, a young Oxford mathematician, had taken the Liddell sisters, Lorina, Alice, and Edith, on a picnic trip up the Thames. To entertain them, he improvised the tale of a girl named Alice who tumbles down a rabbit hole.

Ten-year-old Alice loved it so much that she asked him to write it down. In November 1864, he gave her a handwritten, self-illustrated manuscript. The expanded version, published in 1865 under the pen name "Lewis Carroll," became Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In 1928, a widowed Alice sold that manuscript at auction for £15,400 (about £800,000 today), nearly four times its reserve price.

For his first birthday, Christopher Robin, A.A. Milne's son, received a teddy bear from Harrods. The family named it Edward. But later, the boy renamed it after two favorite animals: Winnie, a black bear at the London Zoo named for the Canadian city of Winnipeg, and Pooh, a swan.

Christopher had other toys, like Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo, and Tigger. His father started writing stories about them and added Owl and Rabbit from his own imagination. Winnie-the-Pooh was published in 1926, with the real boy appearing under his own name. Another sweet detail is that illustrator E.H. Shepard didn't draw Christopher's bear; he sketched his own son's teddy, Growler. The original toys have lived at the New York Public Library since 1987, all except Roo, who was lost in an apple orchard in the 1930s.

The boy who never grew up was built from five brothers who did. In 1897, Scottish playwright J.M. Barrie was walking through London's Kensington Gardens when he befriended George and Jack Llewelyn Davies, out with their nurse and baby brother Peter.

Barrie won them over by wiggling his ears and telling stories about fairies, pirates, and desert islands. Their games grew into the play Peter Pan, first staged in 1904, and a 1911 novel. The hero took baby Peter's name, though family accounts say George and a younger brother, Michael, were the main models. Wendy's brother John was named after Jack.

After both parents died, Barrie became the boys' guardian. In 1928, he confessed he had made the fictional Peter "by rubbing the five of the boys together." A year later, he gave Peter Pan's rights to London's Great Ormond Street children's hospital.

In the rainy summer of 1881, a 30-year-old Scottish writer who had never published a novel was stuck indoors in the Highland village of Braemar. His 12-year-old stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, passed the days painting with a box of watercolors, and one afternoon he was coloring the map of an imaginary island.

Robert Louis Stevenson leaned over his shoulder, added details, and started naming places: Skeleton Island, Spyglass Hill, and finally, in the corner, "Treasure Island." Within days, he was writing chapters and reading them aloud to the family each evening. The tale first ran in a children's magazine under the name "Captain George North" and became a book in 1883. Every pirate cliché since, from the X on the map to the one-legged sailor with a parrot, traces back to that holiday.

In May 1868, publisher Thomas Niles asked Louisa May Alcott for "a girls' story." In her journal, she wrote that she had never liked girls or known many, except her sisters. So she wrote about them.

Tomboyish, bookish Jo was Louisa herself. Meg was her older sister, Anna, who fell in love with her husband while acting opposite him in a play and married him in the family parlor, just like Meg. Gentle Beth was Lizzie, who caught scarlet fever from a poor family their mother had helped, as Beth does, and died in 1858. Artistic Amy was May, whose name Louisa simply rearranged. The real May illustrated the first edition of the book.

When World War II began in September 1939, a group of evacuated schoolgirls arrived at C.S. Lewis's home outside Oxford. This was probably the spark for a story about four children sent away from London to an old country house, where the youngest finds a magic wardrobe.

Lewis named that girl Lucy, after his goddaughter, Lucy Barfield, daughter of his close friend Owen. He began the book when she was 4 and finished it when she was 13. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published in 1950 and became the first of seven Chronicles of Narnia.

The strongest girl in the world was invented by a sick 7-year-old. In the winter of 1941, Karin Lindgren was confined to bed in Stockholm with pneumonia and asked her mother, Astrid Lindgren, for a story about "Pippi Longstocking," a name she made up on the spot.

Astrid reasoned that such a strange name deserved a strange girl, and improvised the tale of a freckled, red-braided 9-year-old who lives without parents and can lift a horse with one hand. The stories became a family ritual and later, in 1944, laid up with a sprained ankle, Astrid finally wrote them down as a present for Karin's 10th birthday. Years later, Karin confessed that she identified less with Pippi than with Tommy and Annika, the well-behaved children next door.

Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy, about a kind-hearted American boy who learns he is heir to an English earl, was serialized in St. Nicholas magazine and published as a book in 1886.

Its hero, Cedric, was modeled on her younger son, Vivian, right down to the long curls and the velvet suits with lace collars she sewed for her boys herself. The book launched a fashion craze, and countless American boys were squeezed into "Fauntleroy suits." Vivian cut his curls by age 10, but a magazine article by his mother publicly identified him as the model. When he died in 1937, just after helping rescue four people from a capsized sailboat, the New York Times headline still called him the "Original Fauntleroy."

It all started as a get-well letter. Beatrix Potter was 27 years old in 1893, on holiday in Scotland when she wrote to Noel Moore, the 5-year-old son of her former governess, who was recovering from scarlet fever.

Unsure what to write, she decided to "tell a story about four little rabbits": Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter. She illustrated it as she went, and the mischievous hero was inspired by her own pet rabbit, Peter Piper. In 1900, Noel's mother suggested that Potter's picture letters could become books. Publishers turned the story down, so in 1901 Potter printed 250 copies herself. The following year, Frederick Warne, one of the firms that had rejected her, published The Tale of Peter Rabbit in color. It has never been out of print since.

In 1940, Life magazine ran a strip of four photos of a small boy in Liberty County, Georgia, waiting nervously for a blood test. A 24-year-old artist named Ezra Jack Keats cut them out and pinned them above his desk. He later recalled being captivated by the boy's face, his posture, even the way he wore his clothes.

Keats never learned the real boy's name, but the photos stayed with him for more than two decades. When Keats finally wrote and illustrated a book of his own, that boy became Peter, who wanders his city neighborhood after the first snowfall. The Snowy Day (1962) was built from cut paper, handmade stamps, and spattered ink, and in 1963 it became the first Caldecott Medal winner with an African American child as its hero. The book, however, went on to become the most checked-out title in New York Public Library history.

Beloved lyrics

"For what is a man?": Some of the wisest lyric lines ever written

Paul Anka was terrified when he sat down to write the lyrics for a song that Frank Sinatra would be singing. Jokingly, he started with a dramatic, "And now, the end is near…" The rest is history. Who are the people who pen the words that others will spend decades repeating? How did they come up with words so precise and true that listeners would compare them with those of great philosophers? Here are 10 of people’s favorite lyrics of all time, decoded.

"For what is a man? What has he got? If not himself, then he has naught." The melody of "My Way" wasn't originally American. It began as a French song called Comme d'habitude, a number about a couple stuck in a stale marriage. Paul Anka heard it on the radio while in France and bought the rights on the spot, before he had any use for it.

That use arrived at a dinner in Miami, when Sinatra told him, almost in passing, that he was quitting the business. Anka flew home, sat down at a typewriter, and spent one night writing lyrics as if Sinatra himself were speaking them. Sinatra recorded it in two takes and later called it his "national anthem," and many agreed; Anka had written the exact words one wants to belt while closing an episode of their life.

In "Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)," John Lennon wrote: "Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans." But the phrase originated with American writer and cartoonist Allen Saunders, who published it in a 1957 issue of Reader's Digest ("Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans").

The line outlived everything else about the song, repeated at graduations and eulogies for decades since. Lennon was murdered shortly after the album's release, which means the song now carries a weight of hindsight neither he nor his listeners could have intended at the time.

"How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?" A young Bob Dylan wrote "Blowin' in the Wind" in 1962. He later claimed he wrote the entire song in about ten minutes at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village, borrowing its melody from the old spiritual "No More Auction Block." He was twenty-one, barely a year into his New York career, and insisted at the time it wasn't a protest song at all.

The song never answers its questions, but keeps asking them. First published in the folk magazine Broadside in May 1962, it became the unofficial anthem of the civil rights and antiwar movements once Peter, Paul and Mary's cover shot to number two on the charts in 1963.

"... is equal to the love you make." This is the last song the four Beatles ever recorded together, and Paul McCartney built it deliberately as a farewell. He gave Ringo Starr his only drum solo in the band's history, a fight McCartney had to win through what he called "gentle persuasion," since Starr detested solos on principle.

For the closing line, McCartney said he'd been thinking about Shakespeare, who often ended a scene with a rhyming couplet so the audience would know it was truly over. Even John Lennon, who generally disliked the Abbey Road medley and rarely praised his old partner's work by 1980, admitted the closing thought was "a very cosmic, philosophical line."

"... but it’s better than drinking alone." "Piano Man", by Billy Joel, narrates a song in which the character is real. Joel wrote it about the six months he spent playing piano under the fake name "Bill Martin" at a Los Angeles lounge called The Executive Room. Even the waitress "practicing politics" was Elizabeth Weber, the woman who'd soon become his wife.

Joel wrote it while hiding out from a record label he was desperate to escape after his debut album flopped. It became a bittersweet anthem that many people love singing with others; it seems like, as the song suggests, singing sorrows together at the bar is better than feeling them at home.

The whole song "Both Sides Now," by Joni Mitchell, is often quoted as a deeply philosophical observation of life. It concludes that some mysteries of life are as unknowable as the clouds, or love, despite accumulating experience.

When she wrote it, Mitchell had recently given up a daughter for adoption after being left by the child's father. She was twenty-three, mid-flight, after a passage in Saul Bellow's novel Henderson the Rain King described its narrator looking down at clouds from an airplane, something human eyes had only been able to do for a few decades. Judy Collins released it first in 1967 and won a Grammy for it; Mitchell's own version didn't appear until her 1969 album Clouds.

Kris Kristofferson’s song, "Me and Bobby McGee", contains one of people’s favorite quotes from song lyrics. Its title came from producer Fred Foster, who suggested Kristofferson write a song about his colleague's secretary, Barbara "Bobbie" McKee.

Its most quoted idea about freedom and loss was inspired, Kristofferson later said, by the final scene of Fellini's La Strada, in which a man realizes too late what he threw away. Roger Miller released it first, but it was Janis Joplin's posthumous 1971 recording, finished mere days before her death, that turned it into a number one hit and an accidental epitaph.

"... and I'm getting older too." Nicks says she wrote "Landslide" in about five minutes, sitting in a rented house in Aspen while her partner and musical collaborator, Lindsey Buckingham, was on tour rehearsing with the Everly Brothers. The song's real subject isn't romance, but the vertigo of watching time pass. She was twenty-seven, broke, working as a waitress and a cleaner, and their duo album had just been dropped by its label.

Looking at the snow on the Rockies, she found herself deciding whether to keep chasing music at all. Three months later, Mick Fleetwood heard Buckingham's guitar work on a demo and invited the pair into Fleetwood Mac, which changed their lives. The song has now aged into an anthem for anyone facing a hinge point in their own life.

"You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime you'll find you get what you need." Mick Jagger sketched this one alone on an acoustic guitar, calling it "one of those bedroom songs." It closed 1969's Let It Bleed just as the decade's peace-and-love optimism was cracking.

The song is upbeat and simple, and unexpectedly insists on an idea of acceptance or surrender that has more to do with Stoic philosophy than with pop rock optimism. But the listeners liked it, and many quote it often.

"...that's how the light gets in." Leonard Cohen worked on "Anthem" for roughly a decade, discarding draft after draft, before it finally appeared on his 1992 album The Future. He wasn't a man given to explaining his own lyrics, having spent years training as an ordained Zen Buddhist monk and generally preferring silence to self-analysis.

But "Anthem" has the clearest statement of a philosophy he'd circled his entire career: that brokenness can give way to grace. It has since been invoked by human rights activists, quoted at protests, and performed at civic ceremonies.