George Steiner

George Steiner (born April 23, 1929, Paris, France—died February 3, 2020, Cambridge, England) was an influential French-born American literary critic who studied the relationship between literature and society, particularly in light of modern history. His writings on language and the Holocaust reached a wide, nonacademic audience.

Steiner was born in Paris of émigré Austrian parents and educated at the Sorbonne, the University of Chicago (B.A., 1948), Harvard University (A.M., 1950), and the University of Oxford (Ph.D., 1955). He became an American citizen in 1944 but spent much of his time in Europe. He was a member of the editorial staff of The Economist (1952–56) and worked at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University (1956–58) before teaching at Churchill College, Cambridge, the University of Geneva, and Harvard University.

Steiner’s first book, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1959), compares the two authors on the basis of historical, biographical, and philosophical data. Language and Silence (1967) is a collection of essays that examines the dehumanizing effect that World War II and the Holocaust had on literature. Steiner considered himself “at home in three and a half languages” (the half for American English as contrasted with British English). Some of his most intriguing work explores the intersection of culture and linguistics that underlies translation and multilingualism; in Extraterritorial (1971) he focuses on linguistics and authors who wrote in several languages, and After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (1975) is perhaps his most ambitious work. In 1996 Steiner published No Passion Spent: Essays 1978–1995, about language and its relation to both religion and literature.

Among Steiner’s other critical works are The Death of Tragedy (1961), In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (1971), On Difficulty, and Other Essays (1978), Martin Heidegger (1979), Antigones (1984), and Real Presences (1989). His fiction includes Anno Domini (1964), The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H. (1981), Proofs and Three Parables (1992), and The Deeps of the Sea and Other Fiction (1996). George Steiner at the New Yorker (2009) is a collection of his writings for the magazine. His other books include the autobiography Errata: An Examined Life (1997) and My Unwritten Books (2008), which is part memoir.