E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" is one of the most beloved children's stories of all time and a Christmas classic. The story is the basis for the most popular ballet in the world, Pyotr Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker."

In the story, a young girl named Marie is given a precious nutcracker as a Christmas present by her godfather, the enigmatic Drosselmeier. When the nutcracker is broken, Marie attempts to repair it and stays up late to tend to her new toy, but when the nursery is invaded by an army of mice - led by the seven-headed Mouse King - the nutcracker comes to life to both drive off the mice and escort Marie to a magical land of living dolls.

One of the most beloved Christmas stories of all time, "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" is presented here in its original and unabridged format, as translated from the German by Mrs. St. Simon.

E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) was a German jurist, composer, artist and Romantic author of fantasy and Gothic horror. A number of later works - including two ballets and an opera - were adapted from his works, most notably "The Nutcracker" by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, which is based upon Hoffmann's "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" and has gone on to become one of the most popular ballets in history. While Hoffmann was educated for a career in the law and government - which he pursued for much of his young life - he was drawn to writing, drawing and literature and eventually wound up running several theatres, sometimes contributing his own work. But his literary output was hardly limited to the stage. Hoffmann wrote short stories, operas, novellas, lyrics and even composed his own music. A leading writer of the Romanticism movement, his taste for the dark and macabre influenced many writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Franz Kafka. In 1881, composer Jacques Offenbach wrote an opera fantastique called "The Tales of Hoffmann" in which a heavily fictionalized Hoffmann presents three of his short stories. Towards the end of his life, Hoffmann was plagued by legal disputes, ill-health, alcoholism and an advanced case of syphilis, which finally took his life in Berlin in 1822 at the age of forty-six.