Hans Christian Andersen

Andersen published his first booklet of tales 'told for children' in 1835 and went on issuing new collections, titled New Fairy Tales from 1843 and Stories from 1852, until 1872. His versions of folk tales and his own inventions include "The Little Mermaid", "The Emperor's New Clothes" and "The Ugly Duckling". In an 1869 essay the Danish critic Georg Brandes analysed how their prose reproduces the spoken language used with children.

Besides the tales he wrote novels, among them The Improvisatore (1835), O.T. (1836) and Only a Fiddler (1837), which were translated into German soon after they appeared. He also wrote travel books, from A Walking Tour from Holmen's Canal to the East Point of Amager (1829) to A Poet's Bazaar (1842) and In Spain (1863).

Andersen wrote or adapted about thirty works for the stage, including revues, vaudevilles, the drama The Mulatto (1840) and plays for Copenhagen's Casino theatre. His libretto for J. P. E. Hartmann's opera Little Kirsten (1846) became, in the words of the Andersen scholar Johan de Mylius, a sort of Danish national opera, and he persuaded Franz Liszt to stage it at Weimar in 1856.

In his memoirs, quoted by the biographer R. Nisbet Bain, the poet and folklorist J. M. Thiele recalled how, around 1821, an unknown, shabbily dressed youth knocked, came into his study unannounced, bowed and asked to recite a poem of his own about the stage. Without waiting for an answer he performed it, then scenes from several plays, taking all the parts, and left. Thiele learned only that evening that the visitor was Hans Christian Andersen.

Walking uninvited into a writer's study and taking the floor there offers one early example of the forwardness reflected in the profile's social assertiveness, a forwardness that also drew ridicule in these years. Social Assertiveness

Andersen believed the Royal Theatre's censor judged his name rather than his plays, so he submitted the one-act drama The King Dreams in November 1843, and the comedy The New Lying-in Room in January 1845, without his name. Both were accepted and staged. According to his biographer R. Nisbet Bain, few people guessed the author of the comedy, and Andersen kept the secret while it ran.

Finding a way around a route he saw as blocked, rather than simply pressing the same case again, is consistent with the profile's resourcefulness score. Resourcefulness

By mid-1822 the Royal Theatre had dropped Andersen from its singing school and returned one play of his as unfit to perform. He sent in another, Alfsol. The director K. L. Rahbek judged it unsuitable for the stage but proposed that its author be helped to get an education, and Jonas Collin put the case to King Frederick VI. That autumn Andersen was sent to the grammar school at Slagelse at public expense, with Collin as his guardian.

Sending in a fresh play straight after a rejection sits alongside the profile's persistence score; the turn itself came from the directors' and Collin's decision, which moved him from chasing a place on the stage to formal schooling. Persistence