You've heard of Sam Small, of course. He's the little man who can answer any knotty question that comes up at the Spread Eagle tavern where the lads of Polkingthorpe Brig like to gather. Some of the time he's an ordinary mortal - as full of stubbornness and shrewdness and truthfulness as any Yorkshireman who ever blev the foam off four or five pints of good ale in an evening. The rest of the time... Well, you'll have to read to believe how he learned to fly like a bird, by faith; how he changed a dog into a lass and back again; how he coped with the two selves of his split personality; and how he was called upon to explain the tricky foreign phrase, droit de seigneur, which said in effect that the duke of the neighboring parish was required by law to go to bed wih Ian Cawper's Mary Ann the night of their wedding.
Author
An author who is mainly notable for creating the fictional collie Lassie. He was a native of Yorkshire in England, and had a varied career, including service in the Canadian Army during World War I and spells as an art student, newspaper reporter and Hollywood screenwriter. His first novel was Song on Your Bugles (1936) about the working class in Northern England. As "Richard Hallas," he wrote the hardboiled genre novel "You Play The Black and The Red Comes Up" (1938). Knight's "This Above All" is considered one of the significant novels of The Second World War. Knight and his wife Jere Knight raised collies on their farm in Pleasant Valley, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. His novel Lassie Come-Home (ISBN 0030441013) appeared in 1940. It was adapted into a movie in 1943 and has been reprinted several times since then. In 1943, at which time he was a major in the United States Army - Special Services, Knight was killed in an air crash in Dutch Guiana (now Surinam).
