Hans Christian Andersen
1805 – 1875 · Denmark
Known for: Danish writer of 156 fairy tales, among them The Little Mermaid and The Ugly Duckling
“Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.”
Biography
Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense on 2 April 1805, the son of a poor shoemaker who read him the Arabian Nights and of an illiterate washerwoman. His father died in 1816, and the boy was sent to a school for the children of the poor and put to work, first with a weaver and then with a tailor. At fourteen he went alone to Copenhagen to make a life in the theatre. A good soprano voice won him a place at the Royal Danish Theatre and then broke; a colleague told him that he was really a poet, and he took the remark seriously. Jonas Collin, a director of the theatre, saw what was there and persuaded King Frederick VI to pay for his schooling in Slagelse and Elsinore. Andersen later called those the darkest years of his life.
Success came in 1829 with a strange comic tale, A Journey on Foot from Holmen's Canal to the East Point of Amager, whose narrator meets Saint Peter and a talking cat. A royal travel grant in 1833 sent him across Europe, and his Italian journey became The Improvisatore, the novel that made his name in 1835. That same May he brought out a booklet of sixty one unbound pages, Fairy Tales Told for Children, holding The Tinderbox, Little Claus and Big Claus, The Princess and the Pea and Little Ida's Flowers. He was paid thirty rigsdaler for the manuscript. Danish critics disliked the chatty voice and thought such stories ought to instruct rather than amuse. He continued. Thumbelina came that December, and in April 1837 The Little Mermaid and The Emperor's New Clothes, whose ending he rewrote on the eve of publication so that a child in the crowd calls out the truth.
Over forty years and nine volumes Andersen wrote 156 tales, among them The Ugly Duckling, The Snow Queen, The Nightingale, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, The Red Shoes and The Little Match Girl. He also wrote novels, plays, poems and travel books, and he travelled almost continually, at ease with the famous and never quite at ease anywhere. He never married. He died on 4 August 1875 at Rolighed, the country house of the Melchior family near Copenhagen, and was buried in the city. His tales have since been translated into more than 125 languages and have passed into ballet, theatre and film, and into the common memory of readers who no longer remember where they first heard them.