Freddy the Pig

Freddy the Pig is the central figure in a series of 26 children's books written between 1927 and 1958 by Walter R. Brooks. Consisting of 25 novels and one poetry collection, they focus on the adventures of a group of animals living on a farm in upstate New York.

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Freddy is introduced as "the smallest and cleverest" of the pigs on the Bean Farm, but he quickly becomes the central character of the series. Freddy's interests drive many of the books as he becomes in turn a detective, politician, newspaper editor, magician, pilot, and various other vocations or avocations. He is everyman, or perhaps everychild. He's lazy; he frightens easily; he oversleeps, overeats, and daydreams. Yet somehow he always manages to rise to the occasion, and his multifacted interests appeal to every child -- and perhaps the child within each of us -- who wants to explore all of life's possibilities.

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Other major characters in the series include Jinx, the no-nonsense farm cat; Mrs. Wiggins, the very down-to-earth, commonsensical cow; and Charles, the blowhard rooster. A recurring villain is the slimy but dignified Simon, who leads a gang of rats to nefarious deeds on the Bean Farm. Human characters include Mr. and Mrs. Bean, who own the farm, and various denizens of the (imaginary) local town of Centerboro such as Mr. Weezer, the banker whose glasses fall off at any mention of a sum over ten dollars, and Mrs. Church, who despite being very wealthy prefers to wear dime-store jewelry because it looks just as good as the real thing.

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Brooks created his animals originally for To and Again (1927) (later retitled Freddy Goes to Florida). It took some time before their personalities -- and their ability to talk to humans when they chose -- were fully developed, but eventually Brooks hit his stride with such books as Freddy and the Bean Home News (1943), which strongly reflects a wartime atmosphere in small-town New York State.

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In the remainder of the series, the animals of the Bean Farm lead a highly developed life, variously operating a bank, a newspaper, the First Animal Republic, and of course Freddy's detective business, which follows the principles of Sherlock Holmes as Freddy knows them from his devoted reading.

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Despite their being quite popular in the 1940s and 1950s, the books went out of fashion and out of print in the 1960s, although children's departments in some fortunate libraries continued to make them available. In the past decade they have been republished by Overlook Press, in response to plaintive requests from Freddy fans who remember the books from childhood and treasure their combination of ingenious plots, well-drawn characters, literary allusions, and wholesome (but not cloying) moral lessons. Adam Hochschild, writing in The New York Times Book Review, describes the series as "the moral center of my childhood universe."

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