Andersen wrote one hundred fifty-six fairy tales
Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) turned a poor Odense childhood into stories that now exist in more than 125 languages. Nine volumes hold 156 fairy tales that stuck in Western memory. A theater director and a king helped pay for the schooling that made the writer.
Andersen was born in Odense in 1805 to a shoemaker father who read him the Arabian Nights and a washerwoman mother who could not read; a persistent but contested rumour made him an illegitimate son of the future Christian VIII. After his father died in 1816 he attended a school for poor children and apprenticed with a weaver and then a tailor. At 14 he left for Copenhagen. Jonas Collin of the Royal Danish Theatre took him up and talked King Frederick VI into funding grammar school at Slagelse, years Andersen later called the darkest of his life, marked by abuse and discouragement from writing.
His first fairy tales came out in cheap booklets from C. A. Reitzel between 1835 and 1837. The first, of 8 May 1835, held The Tinderbox and The Princess and the Pea, reworked from folk stories he heard as a child, and earned him thirty rigsdalers. Thumbelina followed that December, and in April 1837 came The Little Mermaid, inspired partly by Fouqué's Undine, and The Emperor's New Clothes, drawn from a medieval Spanish tale. Danish critics were cool, disliking the chatty tone and the lack of moral instruction, but The Little Mermaid made his name abroad. In 2012 an archive yielded an even earlier tale, The Tallow Candle, written while he was still at school.
Fame across Europe brought royal patrons and travel, recorded in books such as In Sweden of 1851. On his first English visit in 1847 he met Charles Dickens at the Countess of Blessington's parties. A decade later he stretched a short stay at Dickens's home into five weeks, upsetting the family, and Dickens quietly let the correspondence die, leaving Andersen baffled.
His private life was lonely. Letters show a hopeless attachment to Edvard Collin, who admitted he could not return the feeling. In 1868 an American editor offered him $500 for new stories, and several appeared there before Danish publication.
Source: Hans Christian Andersen
