Talking animals enact brief moral lessons, from the tortoise outracing the hare to the fox spurning sour grapes.
Books that mention Aesop's Fables (10)
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot: “But I’ve got ‘Æsop’s Fables,’ and a book about Kangaroos and things, and the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress....’”
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab by Fergus Hume: “Surely you don't want every song to have a moral, like a book of Aesop's Fables?"”
Representative Men by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Vedas, Aesop's Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men.”
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño: “two of the books on the first children's reading list were La Fontaine and Aesop's Fables.”
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin: “He read and reread the Bible and Aesop’s Fables so many times that years later he could recite whole passages and entire stories from memory.”
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood: “As a child I'd read a book called Aesop's Fables. I'd got it from the school library... In this book was a story I have often meditated upon.”
Pamela by Samuel Richardson: “Why, no more nor less, than that I am like the grasshopper in the fable, which I have read of in my lady's book, as follows:--[See the Aesop's Fables which have lately been selected and reformed from those of Sir R. L'Estrange, and the most eminent mythologists.]”
The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton: “6500. As true as Homer's Iliad, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Aesop's Fables.”