Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) was born in Odense, Denmark, the son of a poor shoemaker and a washerwoman. At fourteen he went alone to Copenhagen hoping to work in the theatre; patrons, above all the state official Jonas Collin, paid for his late schooling at Slagelse and Elsinore. He wrote novels, plays, poems and travel books, and won European fame with his novel The Improvisatore (1835), but he is remembered above all for the 156 fairy tales and stories he published between 1835 and 1872. He died in Copenhagen in 1875 and was honored with a public funeral in the Cathedral of Our Lady.
This selection gathers fourteen of Hans Christian Andersen's most loved fairy tales, written between 1835 and 1845, in the English versions revised and partly newly translated by the Scottish scholar W. A. Craigie for Oxford University Press in 1914. In The Tinder-Box a returning soldier fetches a magic tinder-box from a hollow tree for a witch, keeps it, and with the help of three dogs with enormous eyes wins a princess and a kingdom.
The True Story of My Life is the autobiographical sketch Hans Christian Andersen wrote in 1846, at forty-one, for a collected edition of his works. He opens by calling his life a lovely story, happy and full of incident, and says it shows that a loving God directs all things for the best.
