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.

The Brothers Grimm

If it were not for these two German writers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, best- known as the Brothers Grimm, many of us wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the classic fairy tales, since they would have been lost in time.
Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) were born in Hanau, in the city of Hessen, near Frankfurt. They belonged to a working family and spent their early childhood in the countryside, and between 1790 and 1796 they lived near the magistrates’ house, since their father, Philip Wilhelm, a lawyer and court official, worked for Prince of Hessen.
They had one sister and six more brothers, three of whom died very young. Their father also died in 1797, so that the Grimm Family had to move into an urban residence and lived there during two years.
When in 1808, their mother, Dorothea Grimm, died at the age of fifty-two, Jacob began working as a librarian and Wilhelm as a secretary.
They both attended classes at the University of Marburg to become lawyers. While studying, these two writers started to research and collect folk tales originated centuries before and that had only been passed down by word of mouth. Their main aim was to preserve such material as a valuable part of German culture and history.
In their resource they included a collection of some of the most famous fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Snow white and the Seven Drawfs and Rumpelstiltskin. In 1812 Jacob and Wilhelm published their first book called Children’s and Household Tales, which included more than eighty stories. On top of that, in the following volume of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, seventy more folktales, and continued up to reach six more editions with two hundred stories.
In 1825 Wilhelm Grimm married Henriette Dorothea, but throughout their lives the two brothers were very closed to each other and they went on living together.
Both brothers worked in the University of Gottingen, but in 1837 they were dismissed because they protested against a constitutional violation of the King Ernest August I of Hannover. However, they were offered to take a new position as professors at the University of Berlin where they worked from 1842 to 1852. In the meantime, Jacob became member of the Parliament of Frankfurt. After that time, they decided to abandon their work there and dedicated fully to their studies and writings.
They became specialized in the German language and also wrote German Mythology, Old German Tales and The History of the German Language. Apart from their books, they also published a German historical dictionary, the Deutsches Worterbook, which was finally completed by other authors in 1954.
In 1859 Wilhelm died at the age of seventy-three and four years later his brother Jacob also died when he was seventy-eight.
Many of their fairy tales have become popular among children all over the world and most of us still enjoy those stories full of imagination and have been translated into more than one-hundred and fifty languages.

Charles Perrault

Charles Perrault is a famous writer widely well-known as he started a new literary genre, the Fairy Tale. His most famous stories had a folk starting point and even today are in print and have been made into movies, plays and operas.
Perrault was born in Paris on 12 January 1628. His twin brother Claude was one of the architects of the Louvre Museum. They belonged to a wealthy family which allowed them study at the best schools.
In 1643 Charles started to study law, but some years later, in 1654 he began to work in the government service. He took part in the opening of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Painting, too. His first book Troya’s Walls appeared in 1661, and two years later, when the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Letters was founded, he became secretary and server under Jean Baptiste Colbert, minister to King Louis XIV. During that time he began to write poems, discourses, odes and other kinds of writings highly enjoyed by princes and the king himself.
Among his most famous tales we find:
Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Puss in Boots, My Thumb, Donkey skin, Patient Griselda, The Ridiculous Wishes, Diamonds and Toads and Ricky of the Tuft.
These tales have managed to survive in time and became favourite literature for kids since they are full of magic and imagination. The characters in the tales are princesses, witches, ogres, fairies, talking animals and charming princes. Moreover, in every story there is always a moral teaching and a happy end.
At the age of twenty-four Charles married Marie Guichon who died in 1678 during the labor of their daughter. The couple also had three more sons.
In 1687 Charles wrote The Century of Louis the Great and between 1688 and 1692, Parallel between Ancients and Moderns.
In 1995, when he lost his job as secretary, at the age of sixty-seven, his career gave a turning point and he began to write for children. He published Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals, with the subtitle Tales of Mother Goose. This book, which appeared under the name of one of his sons, Pierre Perrault, founded the beginning of the fairy tale as a new literary genre. In the folktales the author used different images he found around him and contrasted them with other ones from the world of fashion.
This author died in Paris in 1703 when he was seventy-five.