The Invisible Prince

Andrew Lang was a Scottish poet, novelist, literary critic and renowned lecturer who - along with his wife and collaborator Leonora Blanche Alleyne - began collecting tall tales, fairy stories and mythological fables from around the world and publishing them in a series of color-coded books (The Red Fairy Book, The Blue Fairy Book, etc.) - that remained enormously popular for over a hundred years. Drawing from various cultures and translated from numerous languages, the stories they collected feature characters from Norse mythology, French fairy tales, Portuguese bedtime stories and dozens of other sources and offer the original tales of many familiar classic characters, from Rumplestiltskin to Snow White, Rapunzel to Jack and the Beanstalk and many more. Though Andrew and Nora published over twenty-five of these collections of folk tales, poetry, true stories and fantasy prose over the next two decades, Lang was also known for his writing on such topics as anthropology, folklore, spiritualism and history. Nora took over the collection of stories during the 1890's while Andrew simply assumed editorial control and many scholars believe Nora did not receive proper credit for her contributions to these books. Andrew died in 1912, Nora in 1933. A number of famous authors, including E. Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle have given credit to the Langs as being highly influential on their own works.