Andrew Lang | 1844-1912 Known primarily as a historian, literary critic, and translator (he put out "new versions" of the Arabian Nights and of the Iliad and the Odyssey), Andrew Lang collected and adapted dozens of fairy tales in a veritable rainbow of books between 1889 and 1907, including The Blue Fairy Book (with his wife, Leonora Blanche Lang), The Red Fairy Book, The Yellow Fairy Book, The Orange Fairy Book, and The Red Book of Animal Stories. As an influential critic with a column in Longman's magazine, Lang advocated romance over realism. In this critical capacity, he championed Robert Louis Stevenson and H. Rider Haggard, with whom he collaborated on The World's Desire, a "sequel" to The Odyssey, in 1890. While the bulk of Lang's output was for adults (and highly educated adults at that), his interest in fairy tales and other childhood mythologies represents an important strain in Victorian thought, in which fantasy and imagination were recognized as important seats of learning and education.