Pinocchio: The Story of a Puppet (Illustrated) (THE GREAT CLASSICS LIBRARY)

This classic story of a puppet who wants to become a real boy started as a serial written between 1881 and 1883, and was later completed as a book for children in February 1883. It describes the mischievous adventures of Pinocchio, an animated marionette, and his father, a poor woodcarver named Geppetto. The novel incorporates a series of moral lessons in colorful comic images, such as little boys who skip school being turned into donkeys. Most memorably, it also includes the idea that telling a lie will make your nose grow, a minor touch in the story which has become iconic in popular culture. But the variety of adventures and questionable characters encountered by Pinocchio also makes the novel a lighter cousin to works like "Huckleberry Finn" and "Oliver Twist". The 1940 Disney movie of the same tale has fixed a different, but memorable, idea of the work in the American public imagination.