September, 2007:  I first encountered the incomparable Freddy the Pig in our neighborhood public library, when I was about nine years of age. I can't remember which specific work it was in the Walter Brooks series of 26 Freddy books, but I was immediately hooked by the spirited porker's wit, decency, chutzpah and all-too-human flaws, and went on to read several more Freddy adventures (all that our local library owned). He was a detective, a magician, an astronaut, a politician, whatever role was required to solve the problems at hand on a farm full of talking animals. Talking animals? A porcine sleuth? My older brother, a teenager then, sniffed at such anthropomorphisms. "Kid stuff. Juvenile." Yes and no. The Freddy books were exceedingly well written by New Yorker staff writer Brooks and imbued with droll humor and sly satire.

I didn't know it at the time, but Brooks had many erudite admirers. In 1994 in the New York Times Book Review, Adam Hochschild wrote that Lionel Trilling had called the Freddy books "delightful." Furthermore, Hochschild continued, "Other loyalists have claimed Freddy as the ancestor of more famous literary pigs such as those in George Orwell's "Animal Farm" (1945). In fact, in "Freddy the Politician" (first published in 1939 as "Wiggins for President" ), the animals foil a crafty gang of woodpeckers who try to seize control of the Bean Farm by making extravagant promises - a revolving door for the henhouses, cat-proof apartments for the rats and so on. In his book "Fairy Tales and After," the critic Roger Sale pointed out that :Freddy the Politician: "not only preceded Orwell's work but is a good deal more careful with its materials and, for that matter, shrewder about its politics. The actions emerge much less mechanically than do Orwell's."

The Freddy Pig tales are just as entertaining for adults as for children, and certainly not for the dull-witted. They have the age-spanning appeal of the Harry Potter books, which I much enjoyed, although I would say the Freddy the Pig novels are more original and far more subtle. It pleases me to no end that the Brooks books, published between 1927 and 1958, are once again widely available.
 

Freddy the Pig books by Walter R. Brooks