Charles Perrault

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.