The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

Before Disney, before Kevin Costner, before every green-clad archer who ever loosed an arrow on screen, there was Howard Pyle's 1883 masterpiece, the version of Robin Hood that invented the legend as we know it. Pyle, an American illustrator with a painter's eye for vivid detail, gathered scattered medieval ballads and forged them into something alive, funny, and impossibly joyful. The story: a yeoman with a magnificent longbow shoots a Nottingham forester in a fit of pride, and suddenly finds himself an outlaw in Sherwood Forest, where he rallies a band of misfits, knaves, and honest men fed up with the Sheriff's tyranny. What follows is a cascade of brilliantly plotted episodes: the staff fight with Little John, the embarrassing defeat by Friar Tuck, the rescue of threelinen-weavers, the seduction of Allan a Dale. Each chapter crackles with dialect and hijinks, but beneath the fun beats a radical heart, a celebration of stealing from the brutal rich and giving to the innocent poor. This is the book that taught the world what Robin Hood means.