Arthur Mitchell Ransome was a British author and journalist, the son of a Professor of History at Leeds College. He was best known for writing the Swallows and Amazons series of children's books, which tell of school-holiday adventures of children, mostly in the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads areas of England. The books remain popular to the point that they provide a basis of a tourist industry around Windermere and Coniston Water -- the two lakes that Ransome used as the basis for his fictional North Country lake. He studied chemistry, but quit college to take low-paying jobs as an office assistant in a publishing company and as editor of a failing magazine while writing and becoming a member of the literary scene of London.
In 1914, he covered the Eastern Front in World War I for the radical newspaper, the Daily News. He also covered the Bolshevik Revolution, and became close to Vladamir Lenin and Leon Trotsky.
Old Peter's Russian Tales is a collection of twenty-one Russian folktales drawn from his time in Russia. The tales include "Baba Yaga," the story of the famous witch who lived in a house that walked on chicken feet.
