Auguste Lechner
Auguste Lechner (2 January 1905, Innsbruck, Austria - 25 February 2000, Innsbruck, Austria) was an Austrian writer. Many of her works were aimed at an adolescent audience. Life. Born Auguste Neuner, Lechner studied languages at the University of Innsbruck, and in 1927 she married the managing director of the Tyrolia publishing company, Hermann Lechner. Their son Hansjörg was born in 1930. During the 1930s, she published folk stories in various magazines, and after the Second World War she began to write books for teenage readers, concentrating predominantly on retelling classical and medieval legends and myths. Her extremely wide range  of adaptations drew from Ancient Greek and Roman myths (Hercules, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Golden Fleece and the Aeneid) as well as (King Arthur, The Song of the Nibelungs, Roland and Parzival). With estimated total sales of over a million, she was one of the most successful authors writing in German, and her books have been translated into Dutch, Bulgarian and Korean. Among the well-known artists who provided illustrations for her works were Hans Vonmetz, Maria Rehm, Josef Widmoser and Alfred Kunzenmann. Critical reception. At the time Lechner was writing, she won considerable praise for her blend of  entertainment and education, her mastery of language, her sensitivity to the historical material and the suspense which characterized her works. There was admiration for her ability to make the myths and legends which form an important part of Western civilization accessible to young readers. Some of the more recent criticism has claimed that she does not explore in sufficient depth the values, customs and perspectives of the period she describes, and that her main characters are stylized and simplified. Defenders of her work have pointed out that such criticism is unfair in that the myths and legends that she draws  upon could also be criticised in this way.