Authors

Some of the people listed here made up their own stories. Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish writer, invented The Little Mermaid and The Ugly Duckling, and Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Beatrix Potter and Carlo Collodi wrote theirs from scratch too.

Others wrote down tales that ordinary people already told one another. The Brothers Grimm gathered German folk tales, Asbjørnsen and Moe did the same in Norway, Alexander Afanasyev in Russia, and Joseph Jacobs collected English ones.

A few stand somewhere in between. Charles Perrault gave old French tales a polished literary form in 1697, and Antoine Galland put Sinbad the Sailor into French in his version of the Arabian Nights. Aesop’s fables go back to ancient Greece.

Every author page has a biography and a list of their tales you can read in English. Stories from folk tradition with no known author, such as The Gingerbread Man and Urashima Taro, have a page of their own under Unknown author.