about the authors > Overview of the authors > Hans Christian Andersen
* 2. 4. 1805, Copenhagen
Writer, poet
His earliest works were travel books and vaudeville poems – comic plays with songs, usually involving intrigues, misunderstandings and mistakes. He achieved fame, however, with fictional writing (the novles The Improviser, The Two Baronesses and his autobiography Story of My Life) and especially with his 156 stories. It was his stories that made him famous worldwide.
Andersen prefered artful stories to folk stories, often very brutal ones. He drew his themes for them from his own imagination, but also from folk tradition. Only later did he focus on ordinary life.
The famous author of stories Hans Christian Andersen died in Copenhagen on August 4th. 1875.