"Quite wild animals" by Beatrice Curtis Brown

"Quite wild animals" by Beatrice Curtis Brown is a children’s picture-book of whimsical character sketches written in the early 20th century. It playfully profiles imaginary creatures in short vignettes and verses, using gentle humor to explore manners, vanity, laziness, bravery, and other everyday foibles. In a series of brisk portraits, the narrator introduces Growp, a cross “birst” who lives alone and scares visitors; Doolyboo, the best-mannered darling of everyone; Bawgum, a blustering softy with a playful tail and ponderous words; and Queek, so lazy he has sat for years outside the house he never finished. Gorrible, weighed down by colossal feet, earns a medal by rescuing Doolyboo; the balloon-like Bolla survives on feathers and is forever blown away, even from his own wedding; the lofty, proud Golophos lives in a three-walled house; and the hyphen-loving Squilly-wiggle can’t keep his legs from carrying him off course. We also meet Sloot, a sly sneak angling for respectability; Blumpleby, filthy and greedy, who eats newspapers; Skoonk, too squeaky to speak so he writes letters; Pufftuffin, a warm, fuzzy comfort who grew knock-kneed legs with the wrong pills; Skutch, a tall, shy would-be coat-of-arms with ornamental hands; Spinicum, who lost one of his two side-tails and forever searches for it; and Shimmyhonk, a vain music teacher who performs at every concert. Together these comic mini-biographies form a light, satirical bestiary of odd diets, peculiar homes, and gently mocked quirks. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Read or download for free

For an overview of the different reading options, see our Reading Guide

Reading Options Url Size
Read now! https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77207.html.images 61 kB
EPUB3 (E-readers incl. Send-to-Kindle) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77207.epub3.images 2.8 MB
EPUB (older E-readers) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77207.epub.images 2.8 MB
EPUB (no images, older E-readers) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77207.epub.noimages 122 kB
Kindle https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77207.kf8.images 1.1 MB
older Kindles https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77207.kindle.images 1.1 MB
Plain Text UTF-8 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77207.txt.utf-8 45 kB
Download HTML (zip) https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/77207/pg77207-h.zip 2.5 MB
There may be more files related to this item.

About this eBook

Author Brown, Beatrice Curtis, 1901-1974
LoC No. 23015608
Title "Quite wild animals"
Original Publication New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1923.
Credits Charlene Taylor, Tom Trussel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
Language English
LoC Class PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres
Subject Wit and humor, Juvenile
Category Text
EBook-No. 77207
Release Date
Copyright Status Public domain in the USA.
Downloads 197 downloads in the last 30 days.
Project Gutenberg eBooks are always free!