About the Authors
Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) was born in Odense, Denmark, the son of a poor shoemaker and a washerwoman. As a young teenager, he became quite well known in Odense as a reciter of drama and as a singer. When he was fourteen, he set off for the capital, Copenhagen, determined to become a national success on the stage. He failed miserably, but made some influential friends in the capital who got him into school to remedy his lack of proper education. In 1829 his first book was published. After that, books came out at regular intervals. His stories began to be translated into English as early as 1846. Since then, numerous editions, and more recently Hollywood songs and Disney cartoons, have helped to ensure the continuing popularity of the stories in the English-speaking world.
John Milton (1608–1674) is considered to be among the most learned of all English poets. After graduating from Cambridge, Milton undertook six years of self-directed study in theology, philosophy, history, politics, literature, and science. He then spent several years writing pamphlets for the Puritan and Parliamentary causes. His incessant labors setting the typeface eventually led to blindness. His masterpiece, Paradise Lost, was composed in memory and dictated to a scribe.
Gerard Manley
Hopkins (1844-1889) was a leading Victorian poet and Jesuit priest. His
experiments in prosody and use of imagery make him an innovator of his time. He
attended Oxford University where he became a keen socialite and prolific poet,
influenced by contemporaries such as Robert Bridges and Christina Rossetti.
Hopkins was ordained in 1877 and became a professor of Greek and Latin at
University College Dublin. Some of his best known works are “The Wreck of the
Deutschland” and “The Windhover.”
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832) was a novelist, poet, playwright, philosopher, and scientist. He wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther when he was just twenty-four. “Faust,” his most enduring work, took fifty-seven years to write and was published in its entirety only after Goethe’s death at eighty-three.
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was an influential English poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age of English literature with the 1798 joint publication of Lyrical Ballads. He was Britain’s Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was the most popular and admired American poet of the nineteenth century. Known for his narrative historical and mythic poems, his most famous works include Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, The Courtship of Miles Standish, and Tales of Wayside Inn. Versatile as well as prolific, Longfellow also won fame as a writer of
short ballads and lyrics, and experimented in the essay, the short
story, the novel, and the verse drama.
About the Narrators
Ghizela Rowe has worked in broadcast
television for thirty years on a broad range of programming. Her specialization
is in music. She helps run the Copyright Group, an extensive collection of
master recording rights, and has lent her voice to many audiobooks, including The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Elizabeth Gaskell: The Short Stories, and The Romantics: An Introduction.
Ghizela Rowe has worked in broadcast
television for thirty years on a broad range of programming. Her specialization
is in music. She helps run the Copyright Group, an extensive collection of
master recording rights, and has lent her voice to many audiobooks, including The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Elizabeth Gaskell: The Short Stories, and The Romantics: An Introduction.