George Steiner was born on 23 April 1929 Neuilly, France. He was ‘a European metaphysician with an instinct for the driving ideas of our time’ according to A.S. Bryant. An editor at The Economist in 1952, Steiner moved to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1956. After a year as Fulbright Professor at Innsbruck, he was appointed Gauss Lecturer at Princeton in 1959, and Founding Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge in 1961. He became Senior Book Reviewer at The New Yorker in 1966 and retired as Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Geneva in 1994.
Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, he was also Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative European Literature and Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. He received the Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award from Stanford in 1998. Notable works include Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1958), The Death of Tragedy (1961), In Bluebeard’s Castle (1971), After Babel (1975), Portage to San Cristobal of AH (1981), Proofs and Three Parables (1992), What is Comparative Literature? (1995), Errata (1997), and Lessons of the Masters (2004).
