Author Description

The Blue Fairy Book is one of Andrew Lang's Fairy Books, which constitute a twelve-book series of fairy tale collections. Although Andrew Lang did not collect the stories himself from the oral tradition, the extent of his sources, who had collected them originally made them an immensely influential collection, especially as he used foreign-language sources, giving many of these tales their first appearance in English. Although Lang himself made most of the selections, his wife and other translators did a large portion of the translating and telling of the actual stories. "The irony of Lang's life and work is that although he wrote for a profession-literary criticism; fiction; poems; books and articles on anthropology, mythology, history, and travel ... he is best recognized for the works he did not write."