Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen was a Danish writer whose four-decade writing career produced multiple foundational documents of 19th-century European children's literature — particularly his 168 fairy tales across 1835–1872, including "The Little Mermaid" (1837), "The Emperor's New Clothes" (1837), "The Ugly Duckling" (1843), and "The Snow Queen" (1844). He was born Hans Christian Andersen on April 2, 1805, in Odense, Funen, Denmark, into a Danish working-class family. His father Hans Andersen was an Odense-area shoemaker, and his mother Anne Marie Andersdatter was a homemaker. The 1816 sudden death of his father (when Hans was 11) shaped his early-life biographical narrative.

His teenage and early-adulthood career across 1819–1822 — across multiple Copenhagen-area Royal Theatre apprentice-positions (across which he attempted unsuccessfully to launch a singing-and-acting career) — preceded his 1822 patronage by Danish theatre director Jonas Collin (who funded his ongoing 1822–1828 grammar-school education at Slagelse and Helsingør).

His 1829 first published commercial work — the prose narrative A Journey on Foot from Holmen's Canal to the East Point of Amager — launched his early-career Danish literary public profile. His subsequent 1830s Danish literary career produced multiple Danish poetry collections, three Danish novels (particularly his 1835 first novel The Improvisatore), and his 1835 first commercial fairy-tale collection Eventyr, fortalte for Børn ("Fairy Tales, Told for Children").

His May 1835 first commercial fairy-tale collection — which contained four fairy tales including "The Tinderbox" and "Little Claus and Big Claus" — launched his mid-19th-century international children's-literature public profile. His subsequent 1837 second commercial fairy-tale collection produced his "The Little Mermaid" and "The Emperor's New Clothes" fairy tales — both of which have been continuously cited as foundational documents of 19th-century European children's literature.

His 1843 fairy-tale "The Ugly Duckling" — across which an outcast cygnet discovers it is actually a beautiful swan — produced his 19th-century European autobiographical-allegorical children's-literature public profile. His subsequent multiple commercial fairy-tale collections across 1845–1872 produced over 168 fairy tales across his approximately 40-year fairy-tale-writing career. He died on August 4, 1875, at age 70, in Copenhagen, Denmark, of liver-related complications. He never married, although his ongoing 19th-century romantic-and-platonic relationships with multiple men and women have been continuously cited by historians as evidence of his bisexual identity.

His name Hans is the German-Scandinavian short form of Johannes (the Latin form of John, from the Hebrew Yochanan). Hans has been climbing in American naming since the 2010s.