Hans Christian Andersen: A New Life - Hardcover

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.

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
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