Author. He received notoriety as an award-winning English author of the 20th century, who excelled in writing children's books. He first studied chemistry at Yorkshire College before deciding to follow his dream of becoming a writer. After moving to London in 1920, he worked for publishers as an errand boy before advancing to a freelance writer of articles, stories and reviews. He did reviews on books written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1910 and Oscar Wilde in 1912. His first significant piece was published in 1907, “Bohemia in London,” which was partly an autobiography. He escaped an unhappy marriage by traveling to Russia to study native folktales, which were retold for English children in his 1916 “Old Peter's Russian Tales.” From 1915 to 1929, he was a war correspondent for English newspapers covering World War I and then the Russian Revolution in 1917 reporting from Russia, Latvia and Estonia. Politically, he was not a Communist or socialist, yet he defended Russian politics in “Six Weeks in Russia” in 1919 and “The Crisis in Russia” in 1921; neither of these works were well-accepted in England. By 1924 he was divorced and married to Evgenia Petrovna, who had been Communist leader, Leon Trotsky's secretary. The couple returned to England settling in the Lake District. As a traveling correspondent for the newspaper “Manchester Guardian,” he went to Egypt, Sudan, China, and returned to Russia and the Baltic countries. After a sailing adventure on the Baltic Sea, in 1923 he wrote “Racundra's First Cruise,” which is still a very successful sailing book. He wrote about fishing in his 1929 “Rod and Line” and in 1959 “Mainly About Fishing.” In 1929 he wrote about Russia for the “Encyclopedia Britannica.” In 1930 he started a series of twelve children adventure books dealing with the great outdoors including sailing and fishing; the first book was “Swallow and Amazons.” For his sixth book, “Pigeon Post” in 1936, he was the recipient of the first British Literary award, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Children Literature, yet his 1937 book, “We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea,” was considered his masterpiece. His books are still in print and have been translated into other languages. Today, there is an organization, The Arthur Ransome Society or TAR, which supports Ransome's ideas of the great outdoors with outings in England for sailing and fishing, a quarterly newsletter, plus a library of his books.