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Andrew Lang was "the greatest bookman of our age, and after [Robert Louis] Stevenson, the last great man of letters of the old Scottish tradition," affirms George Gordon in The Dictionary of National Biography. A confirmed polymath and gifted polyglot, in his day Lang was immensely productive and influential. As critic, essayist, folklorist, classicist, historian, translator, novelist, poet, editor, and anthologist, he was active in English literary affairs for well over thirty years until his death in 1912. In the preface to The Violet Fairy Book (1901) Lang affirms that he did not write the popular compilations which are the Fairy Books and for which he is too often remembered, "but, save these, [he had] written almost everything else, except hymns, sermons, and dramatic works." (Here Lang seems to forget that he had written one play, The Black Thief, in 1882; he annotated his own copy, "Very rare indeed, the authors only dramatic work.") Compulsively book oriented, preferring the library study to the lecture hall, Lang devoted his entire mature life to editing and translating the classics of past generations, reading and reviewing the works of contemporaries, and composing and publishing his own massive output in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction comprising a total of about 270 volumes.
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