For more than thirty-five years, from 1875 to 1912, Andrew Lang's essays, reviews, and editorial leaders shaped the opinions and influenced the tastes of the reading public of England and the United States. He was a prolific and facile writer who was always stimulating and often controversial. His principal interest was the reviewing of literature, but he wrote with authority about anthropology, folklore, history, biography, and sports--particularly golf and angling. He had great technical facility as a poet, and he created delightful fairy tales; as a novelist he was better at parody than at serious fiction. He is best remembered as the editor of The Blue Fairy Book and its various colored successors in the twelve-volume series; they delight children today as they did when the first volume appeared in 1889.

The son of John and Jane Plenderleath Sellar Lang, Andrew Lang was born on 31 March 1844, in Selkirk, Scotland, and his...