Best known for the Pippi Longstocking series, Astrid Lindgren is one of Sweden's most important authors. Her works have been translated into more than 90 languages. She renewed children's literature and combined artistic integrity with commitment to the rights of children and young people.
Astrid Lindgren by
The first English-language biography of Astrid Lindgren provides a moving and revealing portrait of the beloved Scandinavian literary icon whose adventures of Pippi Longstocking have influenced generations of young readers all over the world. Lindgren's sometimes turbulent life as an unwed teenage mother, outspoken advocate for the rights of women and children, and celebrated editor and author is chronicled in fascinating detail by Jens Andersen, one of Denmark's most popular biographers. Based on extensive research and access to primary sources and letters, this highly readable account describes Lindgren's battles with depression and her personal struggles through war, poverty, motherhood, and fame. Andersen examines the writer's oeuvre as well to uncover the secrets to the books' universal appeal and why they have resonated so strongly with young readers for more than seventy years.
Hans Christian Andersen was a Danish writer most famously known for his children's fairy tales. He is also well known for his poetry and stories, which have inspired great influence not only on Danish culture, but in translation to over 150 languages the world over.
Hans Christian Andersen by
The 2005 bicentenary of Hans Christian Andersen's birth is an opportunity to re-evaluate the achievement of one of the great figures of the fairy tale and storytelling tradition, a beloved writer famous for The Snow Queen and The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling and The Red Shoes and many other now classic tales. Jack Zipes broadens our understanding of Andersen by exploring the relation of the Danish writer's work to the development of literature and of the fairy tale in particular. Based on thirty-five years of researching and writing on Andersen, this new book is a welcome reconsideration of Andersen's place and of his reception in English-speaking countries and on film.
Hans Christian Andersen by
Hans Christian Andersen was a storyteller for children of all ages. He gave us the now standard versions of many traditional folk tales as well as original stories that have enchanted generations of readers. "The Little Match Girl," "The Emperor's New Clothes," "The Little Mermaid," and "The Ugly Duckling," are just a few of his beloved titles. Andersen was also much more than a writer of children's tales. He was a critical journalist with great enthusiasm for science, an existential thinker, an observant travel-book writer, a passionate novelist, a deft paper cut-out artist, a neurotic hypochondriac, and a man with intense but frustrated sexual desires. He was a man with demons, dreams, yearnings, and visions-a man of flesh and blood. This startling, immensely readable, and definitive new biography by Danish author Jens Andersen (no relation to Hans Christian Andersen) is essential to a full understanding of the man whose writing has influenced the lives of readers young and old for centuries. Delving deeply into archives and correspondence, Jens Andersen sheds brilliant new light on Hans Christian Andersen's writings-the 156 published fairy tales, as well as the novels, short stories, plays, poetry, and non-fiction-and on the writer whose own life had many aspects of the fairy tale. As did some of the memorable characters he created, Andersen grew up in miserable and impoverished circumstances, and as an adult he took steps to keep what he called his "common" background well hidden, propagating myths about his life and family, partially to create a romantic distance from his true background. In this new biography, translated by the PEN translation award-winning Tiina Nunnally, Jens Andersen uncovers much about this man that has never been revealed before. Book jacket.
More Than Meets the Eye by
Americans and other English speakers have long associated the name of Hans Christian Andersen exclusively with fairy tales for children. Danes and other Scandinavians, however, have preserved an awareness that the fairy tales are but part of an extensive and respectable lifework that embraces several other literary forms. Moreover, they have never lost sight of the fact that the fairy tales themselves address adults no less than children. Significantly, many of Andersen's coevals in the U.S. knew of his broader literary activity and the sophistication of his fairy tales. Major authors and critics commented on his various works in leading magazines and books, establishing a noteworthy corpus of criticism. One of them, Horace E. Scudder, wrote a seminal essay that surpassed virtually all contemporary writing on him in any language. The basic purpose of this study, the first of its kind, is to trace the course of American Andersen criticism over the second half of the nineteenth century and to view it in several American contexts.
