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The World Celebrates Denmark's Most Famous Writer

© L. Barrett Powell

He was a creative storyteller for adults and children of all ages, a wonderfully descriptive travel writer, an existentialist, a critical journalist with strong grasp of science and its value, an ardent novelist, a notable paper cut-out artist, a neurotic hypochondriac and a repressed yet sex-fixated eccentric who could not connect with the men and women who were the objects of his unrequited love. He was an impatient, naïve, and extremely sensitive man with the vision and courage to be more than who his birth and society decreed he must be. He fought his demons and did not give up on his dreams. Thus it was that Denmark's Hans Christian Andersen left the world a literary legacy that is being celebrated worldwide bicentennial in 2005.

A Brief History Born in poverty in Odense, Denmark to a washerwoman and an independent shoemaker he suffered not only from lack of money, but from the abuse of other children. Extremely tall, physically awkward, unattractive, and possessing of a soprano singing voice, Andersen was the object of anger, derision, physical abuse and cruel tricks by adults and children. At the age of 14, he once endured having his pants pulled down at work by boys deriding him for his soprano voice. Daring to dream and desiring to move upwards from such abuse and the economically low class position into which he born he ran away to Copenhagen. Once there he met and began working for Jonas Collin, director of the Royal Theater. Through Collin he was able to attend school, something he would never have been able to do Odense, secured a royal patronage (stipend) from the King of Denmark so he could make a living as a writer.

Andersen had plays produced, and both poetry and prose published beginning in 1822. His first success, "A Walk from Holmen's Canal to the East Point of the Island of Amager in the Years 1828 and 1829" (1829), was a great success. Even greater applause came to him in 1835 with the publishing of his first novel, "The Improviser" and that same year he published the first book of his famous fairy tales.

Traveling out of your native country was an unusual undertaking in the 19th century but the courageous and curious Andersen traveled extensively in Europe, Asia, and Africa. One of his more famous tales, "The Shadow" evidences the people and situations he encountered on his journeys. He once (over)stayed at the English home of his colleague Charles Dickens. He continued to write novels, plays, and travel books, but it was his more than 150 fairy tales that established him as one of the great figures of world literature. They have been translated into more than 80 languages and have inspired plays, ballets, films, and works of sculpture and painting. Andersen's tales of fantasy, which include "The Ugly Duckling" (1843), "The Emperor's New Clothes" (1837), "The Snow Queen" (1844), "The Red Shoes" (1845), and "The Little Mermaid" (1837), were innovative in their treatment of complex emotions and concepts and in their use of the vocabulary and constructions of spoken language.

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