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Freddy the Pig
Our Most Illustrious Literary
Porker, Porcine
Detective, Animal Adventurer, & Problem Solver

Freddy Anniversary Collection
(Freddy Goes to Florida
(first published as To and Again), Freddy
Goes to the North
Pole (More To and Again),
Freddy the Detective)
by Chris McGowan
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
Children's Literature
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