About Author

 

Charles Perrault

Charles Perrault (12 January 1628 – 16 May 1703)  was a French author and member of the Académie Française, He laid the foundations for a new literary genre, the fairy tale, with his works derived from earlier folk tales, published in his 1697 book Histoires ou contes du temps passé. The best known of his tales include "Little Red Riding Hood", "Cinderella", "Puss in Boots", "Sleeping Beauty", and "Bluebeard". A lawyer by training, Charles Perrault first worked as an official in charge of royal buildings. He began to win a literary reputation in about 1660 with some light verse and love poetry and spent the rest of his life in promoting the study of literature and the arts. In 1671 he was elected to the Académie Française, which soon was sharply divided by the dispute between the Ancients and the Moderns. Perrault supported the Moderns, who believed that, as civilization progresses, literature evolves with it and that therefore ancient literature is inevitably more coarse and barbarous than modern literature.