The True Story of My Life: A Sketch

The great storyteller looks back on his own improbable life in this tender, often painful autobiography. Born into poverty in a provincial Danish town, young Hans Christian was a strange, bookish child, more inclined toward theater and poetry than the trades his father forced upon him. Andersen writes with unsentimental honesty about his family's struggles, his father's madness and early death, his own agonizing loneliness and sense of being destined for something more. Yet throughout runs the same wild imagination that would birth 'The Little Mermaid' and 'The Ugly Duckling' - a boy who refused to accept the life that was given to him. This is both a literary memoir and a fairy tale in reverse: the story of how a humble cobbler's son became a world treasure. It will change how you read his fairy tales forever.