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Jens Andersen
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Hans Christian Andersen: A New Life Paperback – March 28, 2006

by Jens Andersen (Author), Tiina Nunnally (Translator)
4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars 11 ratings
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Hans Christian Andersen was a storyteller for children of all ages, but he was more than that. He was a critical journalist with great enthusiasm for science, an existential thinker, an observant travel book writer, a passionate novelist, a deft paper cut-out artist, a neurotic hypochondriac, and a man with intense but frustrated sexual desires. This startling and immensely readable, definitive new biography by Danish scholar Jens Andersen is essential to a full understanding of the man whose writing has influenced the lives of readers young and old for centuries. Jens Andersen sheds brilliant new light on Hans Christian Andersen’s writings and on the writer whose own life had many aspects of the fairytale. Like some of the memorable characters he created, Andersen grew up in miserable and impoverished circumstances. He later propagated myths about his life and family, but this new biography uncovers much about this man that has never been revealed before.
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  1. Print length
    630 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Abrams Press
  4. Publication date
    March 28, 2006
  5. Dimensions
    5 x 1 x 8 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    158567737X
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1585677375
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

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.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Abrams Press; 1st edition (March 28, 2006)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 630 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 158567737X
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1585677375
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.1 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 1 x 8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars 11 ratings

About the author

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Jens Andersen

Jens Andersen

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I was born in Copenhagen 1955 and graduated with a PhD in Nordic literature from University of Copenhagen 1993. Since 1990 I have written more than ten biographies. Mostly on famous Scandinavian authors like Hans Christian Andersen (2003), Astrid Lindgren (2014) and Tove Ditlevsen (1997 and 2022). I have also portrayed HRH Queen Margrethe II (2012) and her son HRH Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark (2017). I see the biography genre as a modern way of telling true stories about real people - alive or dead - within real historical framework with both a novelistic and academic touch.

Customer reviews

4.8 out of 5 stars
4.8 out of 5
11 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

FrivFort
5.0 out of 5 stars Andersen biography
Reviewed in the United States on May 3, 2014
Verified Purchase
After having read two biographies of Ibsen and Strindberg, which were overly filled with many facts and figures of questionable importance to an understanding of the men's lives and works, this biography is a delight. I really got an overall view of Andersen's personality, talent and his overwhelming desire to succeed against all odds. His cultivating of wealthy and important benefactors was quite fascinating and the scope of his imagination gives his stories so much more meaning to me. This author knows how to write a biography!
2 people found this helpful
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Matías Loewy
5.0 out of 5 stars A great and lively biography
Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2014
Verified Purchase
Well researched and written, this "new life" of Hans Christian Andersen achieves the purpose of presenting the poet and fairy-tales writer under a new perspective (including his particular emotional sensibility, his real sexual orientation and his "tricks" to promote his work among his friends). Wonderful book!
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Roger Petrich
4.0 out of 5 stars quirky life, double life
Reviewed in the United States on December 17, 2010
Verified Purchase
This is the first bio of Andersen I've read so all was new. Andersen fictionalized his own life for his own contemporaries, so this author has a lot of work to bring out the true details, and psychological contradictions in his life and in his story telling. Andersen seemed to be sort of a "Peter Pan" - avoiding growing up; and working hard to hold on to his "innocence". Many crushes and love affairs [with persons both male and female], but according to this author all "platonic". A charmed life, yet not without dark secrets.
4 people found this helpful
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Jack Ridley
5.0 out of 5 stars Well Crafted 600 Page Biography Covering His Life
Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2005
This is a well written and generally what one would call an excellent 600 page biography of perhaps Denmark's most famous writer who lived from 1805 to 1875. The book has lots of photographs and many interesting pieces of information. It goes into his life at a fine level of detail, and attempts to combine his life story with his travels and his writings, explaining the private and public personalities. I found the book to be expensive at book stores, very expensive, almost too expensive to buy, but it is less expensive as an on line purchase. It is written in a folksy style, a bit different from many biographies, and each chapter has a short one page introduction in italics to set the mood for that chapter. It covers most of his life in great detail more or less in chronological order starting with the young teen age Andersen about 14 - from poor parents - and his break at the Royal Theatre around 1820. There are some excellent photographs of the aging Andersen.

The book tells a fairly detailed story of his breaks and opportunities that allowed him to finish school and obtain some university level education at the Copenhagen University. The book includes many references to his writings including his first writings when he was just seventeen. Like many other famous writers such as Dickens, he came from a home where the father had failed to provide economic support and he had to find work in his youth to survive - and then his father died when he was just 11 years old. Like Dickens and others, that changed his outlook on the world, and Andersen wrote hundreds of stories and short pieces often with the aim of entertaining children to make them happier. Despite the economic hardships, he did gain some inspiration from his father. His mother was interested in folklore and that was passed onto Andersen and reflected in some of his writings. There are chapters on his travels and some on interactions with other European writers of his era in Germany, France and England, and in fact he did meet Dickens. An interesting chapter describes how the famous Andersen lives in his own country of Denmark often living as a free guest as a celebrity getting free meals and lodging - in a way similar to some of our modern athletes or movie stars who go to restaurants or resorts and expect to get free meals in exchange for being photographed with the owner, or giving them signed baseballs, etc.

Overall this is a good read and one can get a fairly good understanding of Andersen, right up to his declining years. He made a name for himself as a writer of fairy tales for children - about farm animals and similar that carry on in conversations as if they are people. He expanded this to include his travels as an element of his writings, Italy being one of the most famous countries, but not the only country. This topic is well covered in the book including trips from Denmark to Portugal and elsewhere. The book is very well organized - much more so than many biographies - and it has a good introduction and index, but not much in the way of notes and follow up documentation. Also, as the authors point out, some of the references are written in Danish.

In any case, this is a substantial but easy to read biography, and one is impressed with the effort and the level of detail.

5 stars.
4 people found this helpful
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Rose Richards
4.0 out of 5 stars A solid and fascinating biography
Reviewed in the United States on January 12, 2015
We're all familiar with his fairy tales: "The Ugly Duckling," "The Little Mermaid," "The Little Match Girl," "The Fir Tree." But how many of us know very much at all about Hans Christian Andersen's life? In this thoroughly researched, yet comfortably readable, biography, Jens Andersen (no relation) presents the Danish author as a complex and eternally fascinating man, from his arrival in Copenhagen as a talented but uncouth adolescent to his death as a rich and famous writer beloved around the world.

Jens Andersen obviously has a great deal of admiration for his subject and affection for his creative work, but he never shies away from discussing the less flattering aspects of the great author's life and character. The Hans Christian Andersen we meet in these pages is every bit as gentle, whimsical, childlike, and melancholy as his stories might have led us to expect, but he's also vain, manipulative, dramatic, and difficult. Andersen glossed over the less savory details of his childhood in his autobiographies, but his biographer examines them unflinchingly. Andersen's ambiguous and conflicted sexuality is discussed here at length, never luridly but with great empathy. His views on art, spirituality, and science are shown to be a unique blend of liberality and tradition. Hans Christian Andersen was a consummate individualist who demanded, almost in spite of himself, to be accepted for exactly what he was. This excellent biography does him justice.

Jens Andersen is a Danish literary critic, and this biography was written in Danish with a Danish audience in mind. Tiina Nunnally's translation is smoothly readable, and she explains in brackets some of the linguistic nuances that don't translate. Even so, it should be pointed out that Jens Andersen assumes a greater familiarity with Danish geography and with nineteenth-century European history and literature than most American readers possess. He refers freely, even alludes casually, to works by Hans Christian Andersen that aren't readily available in English. It's not enough to pose a stumbling block to the general American reader, though readers without even a basic grasp of European cultural history may want to begin their exploration into Hans Christian Andersen's life with a less ambitious biography.

Although thick and challenging, I found this book a pleasure to read. I set it down with a deeper understanding of the Hans Christian Andersen tales I've known and loved since childhood, and with renewed interest in exploring some of his less familiar stories.
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