Author: Marmaduke Park

Aesop is the name traditionally attached to a body of Greek fables that circulated orally from roughly the sixth century BCE. Ancient sources describe him as an enslaved storyteller of great wit, though nothing written by him survives and the collections bearing his name were assembled by later hands. His short animal tales, each ending in a moral, became one of the most widely translated and adapted bodies of literature in the world. Marmaduke Park, who recast them as English verse for a Philadelphia publisher in 1852, left almost no biographical trace beyond the children's books that carry his name.