Authors in History: Enid Blyton

Enid Blyton (11th august 1897-28th November 1968), was born in South London  and was a prolific English children's writer whose books have been among the world's best-sellers since the 1930s, selling more than 600 million copies.  She wrote on a wide range of topics including education, natural history, fantasy, mystery, and biblical narratives and is best remembered today  for her Noddy, Famous Five, Secret Seven  Adventure series. she was the eldest of three children and showed an early interest in music and reading. She was educated at St Christopher's School Beckenham and went on to train as a kindergarten teacher. She taught for five years before her marriage to editor Hugh Pollock with whom she had two daughters. This marriage ended in divorce and she remarried in 1943, to surgeon Kenneth Fraser Darrell Waters.
Following the commercial success of her early novels such as Adventures of The Wishing Chair (1937) and The Enchanted Wood (1939), Blyton went on to build a literary empire, sometimes producing fifty books a year in addition to her prolific magazine and newspaper contributions.  Her writing was unplanned and sprang solely form her unconscious mind.  She typed her stories as events unfolded.  The sheer volume of her work and the speed with which it was produced led to rumours that Blyton employed an army of ghost writers, a charge she vigorously denied.  Blyton's work became increasingly controversial among literary critics, teachers and parents from the 1950s onwards, because of the alleged unchallenging nature of her writing and the themes of her books, particularly the Noddy series.  Some libraries and schools banned her works, which the BBC had refused to broadcast from the 1930s until the 1950s because they perceived to lack literary merit.
She died in 1968, one year after her second husband.