Critic Bios

Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) was born in Berlin and in 1913 received a Doctor of Law degree from the University of Heidelberg. After service in World War I, Auerbach earned a second doctorate in Romance philology and (in 1923) was appointed librarian of the Prussian State Library in Berlin. In 1929, he joined the University of Marburg as profesor of Romance philology and published his first book, Dante, Poet of the Secular World. Auerbach was forced out of University position when Hitler came to power in 1933; he left Germany in 1935 to teach at Istanbul State University. It was in Istanbul, as a wartime exile, that Auerbach wrote the one book by which his best-known, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (published in German in 1946, and translated into English in 1953). Auerbach moved to the United States in 1947. He became a member of the Institute for advanced Study at Princeton and was then appointed Professor of Romance philology at Yale (where he taught until his death).

Georg Lukacs (1885-1971) was born in Hungary to a wealthy Jewish family. He joined the Hungarian Communist Party in 1918 and served as Commisar for Culture and Education during the short-lived Communist regime. After the fall of the Communists in Hungary, Lukacs fled to Vienna and remained in that city for ten years. In 1933, he moved to Moscow to attend the Institute of Philosophy. Lukacs finally returned to Hungary in 1945 and became a member of parliament and a professor of aesthetics and the philosophy of culture at the University of Budapest. His involvement in the Hungarian uprising of 1956 led to his deportation to Romania, though he was allowed to return to his home a year later. Lukacs spent his final years at work on a number of critical and philosophical projects, including his study of the historical novel and a number of books on Marxism and aesthetics.