Charles Perrault was born in Paris on January 1628. Son of an upper-class burgeois family, he attended the best schools and became a lawyer in 1651. He wrote Parallels Between the Ancients and the Moderns, which compared the authors of antiquity unfavorably to modern writers, and became a member of the Academie Francaise in 1671.

His Stories or Tales from Times Past, with Morals: Tales of Mother Goose, published in 1697, gave him great popularity and opened up a new literary genre: fairy tales. Among his most famous versions of fairy tales are "Blue Beard," "Sleeping Beauty on the Woods," "Little Red Riding Hood," "The Master Cat or Puss in Boots," "Cinderella," "Little Thumb," and "Donkey Skin."
He died in Paris on May 1703.

Jacob Grimm and his brother, Wilhelm, are most famous for their classical collections of folk songs and folktales, especially Children's and Household Tales, which is generally known as Grimm's Fairy Tales. Stories such as "Snow White" and "Sleeping Beauty" have been retold countless times, but the Brothers Grimm first wrote them down. In their collaboration, Wilhelm selected and arranged the stories, while Jacob, who was more interested in language and philology, was responsible for the scholarly work. Jacob was born in Hanau, Germany, in 1785. His father, who was educated in law and served as a town clerk, died when Jacob was young. His mother, Dorothea, struggled to pay the education of the children. With financial help from Dorothea's sister, Jacob and Wilhelm were sent to Kasel to attend the Lyzeum. Jacob then studied law at Marburg. He worked from 1816 to 1829 as a librarian at Kasel, where his brother served as a secretary. Between 1821 and 1822, the brothers raised extra money by collecting three volumes of folktales. With these publications they wanted to show that Germans shared a similar culture and to advocate the unification process of the small independent kingdoms and principalities. In 1829, the brothers moved to Gottingen, where Jacob became librarian and Wilhelm became assistant librarian. In 1835, Wilhelm was appointed professor, but they were dismissed two years later for protesting against the abrogation of the Hanover constitution by King Ernest Augustus. In 1840, the brothers accepted an invitation from the King of Prussia, Frederick William IV, to go to Berlin. There, as members of the Royal Academy of Sciences, they lectured at the university. In 1841 they became professors at the University of Berlin, and worked with their most ambitious enterprise, the Deutsches Worterbuch, a large German dictionary. Its first volume appeared in 1854. The work, which totaled sixteen volumes, was finished in the 1960s. The Grimms made major contributions in many fields, notably in the studies of heroic myth and of ancient religion and law. They worked very close, even after Wilhelm married in 1825. Jacob remained unmarried. Wilhelm died of infection in Berlin on December 16, 1859, and Jacob four years later on September 20, 1863.

Hans Christian Andersen (1805–75) was born in Odense, Denmark. The son of a poor shoemaker, who nonetheless was a great reader, made a toy theater for his son and taught him to notice every natural wonder as they walked in the woods together on Sundays. His father died when he was 11, and it wasn’t until six years later that, with the help of a patron, he finally went to a state secondary school attended by much younger children. There he suffered at the hands of a cruel headmaster, but he acquired an education and was determined to be a writer. He published his first novel and his first fairy tales in 1835; thereafter he wrote over 150 more of these stories which have become classics in many languages.Although he originally addressed his fairy tales to children (and some would maintain he had a streak of childhood in his nature) he insisted they were “for all ages,” and the gentleness and humor that are their characteristics are recognized by everyone.

Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711–1780) was the author of Beauty and the Beast and Other Classic French Fairy Tales. In 1746 she left France for London, where she had a successful publishing career. Her version of “Beauty and the Beast” has been retold countless times, both in film and on stage.

George Zarr is an award-winning audio dramatist currently based in Chicago. He is the producer, writer, director, and composer of the Hans Christian Andersen musical The Bell, the four-part comedy Hurry! Hurry! It’s Almost Christmas, the mystery collection Dark of the Moon Inn, and the Western comedy musical serial Hoofbeats in My Heart, all four available from Blackstone Publishing.

Noelle Dupuis is an accomplished voice actor and audiobook narrator based in Ontario, Canada. Some of the titles she has voiced for Voices in the Wind Audio Theatre include Snow White, Cinderella, A Christmas Carol, Bambi, A Life In the Woods, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, and Alice Through the Looking Glass. Noelle’s production company, the First Noelle Productions, also produced full-cast dramatizations of The Bell, The Spirit of Christmas Day, and Hurry! Hurry! It’s Almost Christmas! Blackstone Publishing distributes all these titles.