"After noting Hans Christian Andersen's popularity in the US as a spinner of fairy tales, Rowland (emer., German, Purdue Univ.) goes on to demonstrate the fame of Andersen's novels, travelogues, and autobiography in North America. Indeed, Rowland points out that the US embraced the writer's wholesomeness and "naturalized" all of Andersen's writings as if he had been born on US soil. Rowland made thorough use of newly available resources, including thousands of 19th-century newspapers and magazines that carried Andersen's captivating tales to the hungry audience in the New World. One reviewer speaks of Andersen's "freshness, delicacy of imagination, and poetic sympathy with Nature in all her moods and aspects, which characterize even the simplest of Andersen's tales" (quoted by Rowland on p. 44). One of the delights of Rowland's comprehensive study is the discovery of less familiar works like The Improvisatore (1835; Eng.

tr, 1847). Joining Rowland's More than Meets the Eye: Hans Christian Andersen and Nineteenth-Century American Criticism, this is an extraordinary rediscovery of a classic fabulist! Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers." -- Choice Reviews.