H. C. Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) was a Danish writer, the son of a poor shoemaker in Odense, who went to Copenhagen at fourteen hoping to be an actor and was eventually sent to school by patrons. He wrote novels, plays, poems and travel books, but his fame rests on the tales he began publishing in 1835 and continued for nearly forty years: The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling, The Emperor's New Clothes, The Snow Queen, The Little Match Girl and more than 150 others. Unlike the Grimms, he invented most of them, and their melancholy and irony speak to adults as much as children. He never married.