IMPORTANT NAMES IN LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN

Hans Christian Andersen
The Ugly Duckling, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, The Little Mermaid are some of the most famous tales created by the Danish writer and poet Hans Christian Andersen, who was born on 2nd April,1805, in the slums of Odense, Denmark. Son of a shoemaker and a washerwoman, as a child he received little education and suffered all kinds of humiliations because of his tallness and effeminate interests. When he was fourteen he moved to Copenhagen where he began a career as an actor, singer and dancer at the Royal Theatre.
In 1822 he published his first story The Ghost at Palnatoke's Grave.
He loved travelling and he managed to do so throughout Europe. The result was a number of successful travel books he wrote while meeting different cultures, including: A Walking Tour from the Holmen Canal to the Eastern Point of the Amager (1829); Shadow Pictures (1831); Life in Denmark (1836) and Pictures of Sweden (1851). During his journeys he met Honore de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Charles Dickens, to whom he dedicated A Poet's Day Dreams (1853).
In 1827 his poem The Dying Child was published in the Copenhagen Post. The Mulatto and Love at St. Nicholas'Tower were some of Andersen's plays performed at the Royal Theatre.
In 1835 his first novel The Improvisatore appeared; it was autobiographical and used Italy as the setting. Two years later other novels were published: O.T. and Only a Fiddler.
Since 1835 onwards his Fairy Tales and Stories placed Andersen at the top of Literature for Children. He wrote more than one hundred and fifty stories of this type, written in colloquial style. At the beginning he retold those ones he had learnt as a child, but later on he created his own tales, which in fact have been addressed for both, children and adults, passed through generations and are still being told and adapted by other writers, dramatists and artists. Actually only twelve of his 152 stories drew on folktales. Thumbelina, The Snow Queen, The Emperor's New Clothes, The Princess and the Pea, The Red Shoes, Little Claus and Big Claus, among others appeared in Tales Told for Children, a collection of books published in every Chritsmas during those years.
In 1846 Andersen wrote The True Story of My Life and the same year he was given the Knighthood of the Red Eagle by the King of Prussia and in 1867 he was made an Honorary Citizen of Odense.
In 1855 the author of The Ugly Duckling wrote his memoirs in The Fairy Tales of My Life. On the 4th August, 1875 Andersen died in Copenhagen at the age of seventy, and his stories still live on.