Hans Christian Andersen: A New Life - Softcover

Andersen, Jens

Softcover

ISBN 10: 158567737X ISBN 13: 9781585677375

Publisher: Abrams Press, 2006

Synopsis

Hans Christian Andersen was a storyteller for children of all ages, but he was more than that. 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. This startling and immensely readable, definitive new biography by Danish scholar Jens Andersen is essential to a full understanding of the man whose writing has influenced the lives of readers young and old for centuries. Jens Andersen sheds brilliant new light on Hans Christian Andersen’s writings and on the writer whose own life had many aspects of the fairytale. Like some of the memorable characters he created, Andersen grew up in miserable and impoverished circumstances. He later propagated myths about his life and family, but this new biography uncovers much about this man that has never been revealed before.

About this title

About the Author

Mr. Andersen has a Ph.D. in Nordic Philology from the University of Copenhagen. He is a former soccer player and coach in Denmark. He has won several Danish literature prizes and recognitions over the years.

From Booklist

The Danes may consider Hans Christian Andersen, along with his contemporary (and rival) Soren Kierkegaard, one of their foremost literary treasures, but in America, when thought of at all, he is relegated to the children's shelves. This thick, fascinating new biography makes a good case for the great Dane's place among grownups. For the evocative, gracefully written fairy tales on which his international fame rests have great literary merit, and Andersen was a well-rounded man of letters, equally at home writing for the theater, for newspapers and magazines, and for book publishers. He was also a fascinating bundle of contradictions, and the extensively researched book reveals his multifacetedness: his considerable gifts as an oral storyteller; his eccentric, often annoying public habits; his ambivalent sexuality; his bouts of narcissism; his painfully slow transformation from rough-hewn provincial and awkward melodramatist into brilliant, internationally famous writer-celebrity. The biography is best and most moving when it is frank about formerly suppressed aspects of Andersen's life: the unrequited love he felt and never fully acknowledged for his friend Edvard Collin, and the intense, neurotic, frustrating (for Andersen) nonsexual relationship with his beloved friend and muse, Jenny Lind. Tiina Nunnally, the woman responsible for Englishing Peter Hoeg's best-selling Smilla's Sense of Snow (1993) and the newest versions of Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter and selected Andersen Fairy Tales (2005), has again gracefully translated from the Danish. Jack Helbig
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Abrams Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 158567737X
• ISBN 13: 9781585677375
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 630