So how's about an unbiased, independent eyewitness account?

Here are some excerpts from an English girl's recollections of meeting him one summer: "...his shabby, ungainly, slouching figure, in its ill-fitting, unbrushed clothes...and his ugly musing face, abstracted-seeming but keenly observant." As to her summation of his personality, he "seemed to me to live in a world peculiarly his own, all his ideas, thoughts, and actions differing from those around him."

Some more clues?

Family background: Blue-collar father. His mother died an alcoholic. His aunt was a businesswoman; she owned and operated a brothel. His grandfather was an inpatient in a lunatic asylum. As a youngster, our hero visited the asylum, where his grandmother was an employee, and would listen to his grandmother and her co-workers as they spun yarns, some of which served as the basis of his later writings.

But our story man created his own world in more ways than one. Despite his disadvantaged early years, our writer grew up to hobnob with the leading musicians, composers and theatre people of his day. He loved to travel. He became something of a groupie to the most popular female singer of his time; befriending her, courting her, following her on tour. He left extensive diaries with shocking personal revelations at which I shall not even hint. You may wish, however, to buy the book, so as to satisfy whatever prurient curiosity you may possess.

A penultimate hint: At least two feature films have been made purporting to tell the story of our writer's life. One of them was animated.

If you're still wondering who this fabulous story man is, I will give you one final clue. After that, you're on your own and you'll have to read the title of the book at the conclusion of this review.

(By the way, I also recommend that you read the book itself. It's an excellently researched narrative, told with an unflinching yet sympathetic point of view. The subject is an absolutely fascinating individual who pretty much knew how absolutely fascinating he was.)

Okay, here's your final clue. The first Oscar he inspired was given for Walt Disney's color remake of the earlier black-and-white Silly Symphony, The Ugly Duckling.

Yes, the story of a poor cobbler's son who, through his storytelling, rose to become the toast of European royalty and peasantry alike is a tale of perennial appeal. And in this literate, unvarnished, warts-and-all telling, the story is more revealing, more astonishing and more human than ever.

Hans Christian Andersen: The Life Of A Storyteller by Jackie Wullschlager. New York, New York: Alfred A. Knopf Publishers, 2001. 492 pages, 44 illustrations and 2 maps. isbn: 0-679-45508-6 (US$30.00)

Will Ryan is an Emmy and Writer's Guild award nominee for his work as a writer/producer. He has also done voices for more than 1,000 film and television productions including The Little Mermaid, which incidentally was based on a story by the above well-known story man. Among his current projects is the Annie Award-winning series Elmo Aardvark: Outer Space Detective! and the screenplay for the upcoming film Breakfast in Bedlam.