Biography
Auerbach, who was Jewish, was born in Berlin. He was trained in the German philological tradition and would eventually become, along with Leo Spitzer, one of its best-known scholars. After participating as combatant in World War I, he earned a doctorate in 1921 at University of Greifswald and in 1929 became a member of the philology faculty at the University of Marburg, publishing a well-received study entitled Dante: Poet of the Secular World. With the rise of National Socialism, however, Auerbach was forced to vacate his position in 1935. Exiled from Nazi Germany, he took up residence in Istanbul, Turkey, where he wrote Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), generally considered his masterwork.
He moved to the United States in 1947, teaching at Pennsylvania State University and then working at the Institute for Advanced Study. He was appointed professor of Romance philology at Yale University in 1950, a position he held until his death in 1957 in Wallingford, Connecticut.
While at Yale, Auerbach supervised Fredric Jameson's doctoral work.
Read more about this topic: Erich Auerbach
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