Self-pity is usually the kiss of death for a writer. Even incompetence is less likely to repel or enrage a reader than self-pity: The first might coexist with honest effort, but the second looks more like bad faith, a perversion of the very purpose of literature. Instead of giving his attention to the world, the self-pitying writer demands the world’s attention for himself; instead of sublimating his desires in the work, he makes the work a servant of his ego. That is why nothing more clearly marks the neophyte – the high school versifier, the writing workshop novelist – than the sense that he is writing to and for himself, using the page to dry his own tears, to grant himself the wishes that life impatiently denies.

But in this, as in so many other ways, Hans Christian Andersen – whose 200th anniversary is celebrated this month – was a great exception. No writer begs so shamelessly for our compassion, or displays his soul’s bruises with such a childlike expectation of solicitude. Kierkegaard, his contemporary and fellow graduate from Copenhagen notoriety to universal fame, noted this quality of Andersen’s early on: “There are authors who, like beggars seeking to arouse sympathy by exposing the flaws and deformities of their body, strive to reveal the tattered state of their heart to attract attention.” Indeed, Andersen’s fairy tales are a concourse of the unappreciated and the misunderstood: the Tin Soldier, one-legged but always steadfast, who gets melted into a lump; the Little Mermaid, who dies for the love of a feckless prince; above all, the Ugly Duckling, that eternal dream of resentment rewarded:

He actually felt glad about all the suffering and hardships he had endured. Now he could appreciate his happiness and all the loveliness that awaited him. And the great swans swam all around him, stroking him with their bills. … He thought about how he had been badgered and scorned, and now he heard everyone say that he was the loveliest of all the lovely birds.

Why is it, then, that Andersen’s “stroking” has not met the fate of so many other kinds of high Victorian sentimentality? Oscar Wilde managed to permanently vandalize Dickens’s Little Nell with his famous quip that it is impossible to read about her death without laughing. Yet Andersen’s Little Match Girl, while she is evidently a kind of Danish Nell – a deeply manipulative creation, a predator of pity – remains something more: “All the Christmas candles rose higher and higher; she saw that they had now become the bright stars. One of them fell, leaving a long fiery path in the sky. ‘Someone is dying now,’ said the little girl.”

The cold wind that blows through this passage, as through so many of Andersen’s best tales, does not allow us to forget the immense vacancy that surrounds his cozy crannies. What makes Andersen continue to live, not just as Disney fodder, but as literature – the rightful peer of contemporaries like Dickens and Dostoevsky – is this undercurrent of genuine horror, which reduces all his attempts at consolation to parody.

In his newly translated biography, “Hans Christian Andersen” (Overlook, 608 pages, $37.50), the Danish writer Jens Andersen (no relation) tells the story of Andersen’s meteoric career, a triumph so sensational that he could, without irony, title his memoirs “The Fairy Tale of My Life.” Mr. Andersen’s book is not easy to read, partly because it is more a thematic study than a chronological account, partly because it presupposes a Dane’s level of familiarity with, or at least curiosity about, the national hero. While Mr. Andersen’s biography has some valuable things to say about Hans Christian Andersen’s sexuality, and offers a convincing portrait of the tedious narrowness of 19th-century Danish literary life, the first choice for English readers must remain the 2001 biography by Jackie Wullschlager – who, in another convergence, provides a very useful introduction to the Nunnally volume of “Tales.”

The worst flaw of Mr. Andersen’s book is its entirely graceless, unidiomatic prose, which must be blamed at least in part on the translation by Tiina Nunnally. Yet Ms. Nunnally’s new translation of 30 of Andersen’s stories, in “Fairy Tales” (Viking, 496 pages, $27.95), is lovely and extremely clear, capturing all the colloquial verve of Andersen’s tales. Clearly, the biography was less appealing or amenable to her talents than the stories.

Hans Christian Andersen was by most accounts an unimpressive man; yet one cannot help being impressed by his artistic integrity and tenacity, which saved him from the fate that constantly threatened – winding up as a mere court jester to the upper classes. From the very beginning of his public life, as a 14-year-old on the make in Copenhagen, Andersen benefited from the patronage of the haute bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. He had come to the capital from dreary, provincial Odense, with little money and no connections, determined to get on stage at the Royal Theater. His dream of becoming a star actor was ludicrous, the dream of a boy whose improvised recitations had been indulged by family and neighbors at home, and Andersen never rose higher than a supernumerary in the Theater’s company. He did, however, to attract the interest of Jonas Collin, a powerful member of Denmark’s cultural establishment, who arranged for Andersen to receive a formal education.

It was a pattern that continued throughout his life: Andersen’s naked, urgent appeals for attention and affection were seldom dignified, but they were usually effective. He was especially popular with royalty, who saw in him the most emollient of writers – needy and insecure, grateful for every ribbon and medal. Heinrich Heine commented on this undignified role, so at odds with the heroic pretensions of most Romantic artists, in a passage quoted by Jens Andersen: “He perfectly represents writers as princes wish them to be. When he visited me, he was sporting a big stickpin; I asked him what it was he was wearing. He replied with an unusually unctuous demeanor: ‘It’s a gift that the Electress of Hessen was gracious enough to bestow on me.'” Such monarchs evidently found it easy to overlook the devastating social indictment of “The Little Match Girl,” the political satire of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and the acute sensitivity to class and status in all of Andersen’s work.

The actor’s need for immediate approval, for the validation of applause, always remained strong in Andersen. Like Dickens, he was a highly dramatic reader of his own work, and always enjoyed performing his tales before an audience. As one friend recalled:

“His speaking was … richly adorned with the figures of speech well known to children, and with gestures to match the situation. Even the driest sentences came to life. He did not say, ‘The children got into the carriage and then drove away,’ but ‘They got into the carriage – ‘Goodbye, Dad! Goodbye, Mom!’ – the whip cracked smack! Smack! And away they went, come on! Gee up!” Much of the charm and novelty of the fairy tales comes from the immediacy with which Andersen records his speaking voice. This quality comes across very well in Tiina Nunnally’s new translation of the “Fairy Tales,” as in the opening lines of “The Tinderbox”: “A soldier came marching along the road: left, right! left, right!”

Still more important to Andersen than public acclaim, however, was the affection of friends – above all, of a few close male friends, whom he loved with that confused Platonic passion so familiar in Victorian literary lives. As Jens Andersen demonstrates beyond a doubt, Andersen had a series of intense homoerotic crushes on heterosexual men, and found in the ensuing torment the emotional wellspring of his art. Once Andersen’s homosexuality has been recognized – and it was deliberately obscured by generations of Danish and foreign critics – its centrality to his tales becomes unmistakable.

Images of helpless, unrequited love are everywhere in the early tales, from Gerda’s redeeming love for Kai in “The Snow Queen,” to the Little Mermaid’s hopeless love for the Prince; while the later tales, such as “The Ice Maiden,” take on a nearly Strindbergian sense of sexual doom. Like so many writers from Winckelmann to Thomas Mann, Andersen made his intensely sublimated sexuality the basis for a powerful, universal art. In doing so, he won for himself the kind of beneficent afterlife promised to unhappy spirits in “The Little Mermaid”: “Poor little mermaid, you’ve tried with all your heart. … You’ve suffered and endured, raising yourself up to the world of the sylphs. Now, through good deeds, you too can create an immortal soul for yourself.”