Hans Christian Andersen

How Hans Christian Andersen Revolutionized Storytelling, Plus the Best Illustrations from 150 Years of His Beloved Fairy Tales

by Maria Popova

“Andersen had the ability to articulate desires petty and profound and make them into transcendent tales.”

“When people talk listen completely,”Hemingway counseled in his advice on how to be a writer. More than a century earlier, a little boy in Denmark, born into poverty to a shoemaker father and an illiterate washerwoman mother, was spending his days listening to the old women in the local insane asylum as they spun their yarn and spun their tales to pass the time. This unusual hub of peasant storytelling in the oral tradition of folklore became his laboratory for listening, out of which he would later concoct his own stories — stories beloved the world over, which have raised generations of children into a whimsical world of imaginative play. Hans Christian Andersenthus used that singular talent of listening to lift himself out of poverty and into international celebrity, becoming one of history’s greatest storytellers and the patron saint of the fairy tale genre./.../