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.
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.
Sara
Trevor Teasdale (1884–1933) was born in St Louis,
Missouri. A child of poor health she was fourteen years old when she was well
enough to begin school. Her first poetry publication was in 1907, with her
second book in 1911. She was courted by Vachel Lindsay, a great poet, but one
who thought he could not provide a suitable standard of living. So Sara married
Ernst Filsinger and the couple moved to New York City. In 1917 she released the
poetry collection Love Songs, and the
following year it won three awards: the Columbia University Poetry Society
prize, the 1918 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and the annual prize of the Poetry
Society of America.
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), English poet, dramatist, and novelist, was born on the Egdon Heath in Dorset. He studied in Dorchester and apprenticed to an architect before leaving for London, where he began to write. Unable to find a public for his poetry, which idealized the rural life, he turned to the novel and met with success as well as controversy. The strong public reaction against some of his darker themes turned him back to writing verse. Today several of his novels are considered masterpieces of tragedy.
Janet
Hamilton (1795-1873) was a Scottish poet. She wrote in both English
and Scots on topics like friendship, Scotland, and spirituality.
John
Keble (1792-1866) is the namesake of Keble College, Oxford. He was
an English vicar and author, and held the Chair of Poetry at Oxford for ten
years. He wrote a number of devotional texts, including his best-known work The Christian Year.
About the Narrators
James Langton, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, trained as an actor at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and later as a musician at the Guildhall School in London. He has worked in radio, film, and television, also appearing in theater in England and on Broadway. He is also a professional musician who led the internationally renowned Pasadena Roof Orchestra from 1996 to 2002.
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.