31 Facts About George Steiner

Francis George Steiner, FBA was a Franco-American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist and educator.

George Steiner wrote extensively about the relationship between language, literature and society, as well as the impact of the Holocaust.

George Steiner was Professor of English and Comparative Literature in the University of Geneva, Professor of Comparative Literature and Fellow in the University of Oxford, Professor of Poetry in Harvard University and an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.

George Steiner was born in 1929 in Paris, to Viennese Jewish parents Else and Frederick Georg Steiner.

George Steiner had an elder sister, Ruth Lilian, who was born in Vienna in 1922.

Frederick George Steiner had been a senior lawyer at Austria's central bank, the Oesterreichische Nationalbank; in Paris he was an investment banker.

George Steiner believed that Jews were "endangered guests wherever they went" and equipped his children with languages.

George Steiner grew up with three mother tongues: German, English, and French; his mother was multilingual and would often "begin a sentence in one language and end it in another".

George Steiner's mother, for whom "self-pity was nauseating", helped Steiner overcome a handicap he had been born with, a withered right arm.

In 1940, during World War II, George Steiner's father was in New York City on an economic mission for the French government when the Germans were preparing to invade France, and he got permission for his family to travel to New York.

Again his father's insight had saved his family, and this made George Steiner feel like a survivor, which profoundly influenced his later writings.

George Steiner then attended Balliol College, Oxford, on a Rhodes Scholarship.

George Steiner had studied at Harvard and they met in London at the suggestion of their former professors.

Zara George Steiner died on 13 February 2020, ten days after her husband.

In 1956 George Steiner returned to the United States, where for two years he was a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

George Steiner held a Fulbright professorship in Innsbruck, Austria, from 1958 to 1959.

George Steiner then became a founding fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge in 1961.

George Steiner was initially not well received at Cambridge by the English faculty.

George Steiner had the option of leaving for professorships in the United States, but Steiner's father objected, saying that Hitler, who said no one bearing their name would be left in Europe, would then have won.

George Steiner held the positions of the first Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative European Literature and Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, from 1994 to 1995, and Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University from 2001 to 2002.

George Steiner wrote for The New Yorker for over thirty years, contributing over two hundred reviews.

George Steiner was regarded as a polymath and is often credited with having recast the role of the critic by having explored art and thought unbounded by national frontiers or academic disciplines.

George Steiner advocated generalisation over specialisation, and insisted that the notion of being literate must encompass knowledge of both arts and sciences.

George Steiner found it ostentatious and vaguely corrupt in a nineteen-year-old.

George Steiner received criticism and support for his views that racism is inherent in everyone and that tolerance is only skin deep.

George Steiner published original essays and books that address the anomalies of contemporary Western culture, issues of language and its "debasement" in the post-Holocaust age.

George Steiner's field was primarily comparative literature, and his work as a critic tended toward exploring cultural and philosophical issues, particularly dealing with translation and the nature of language and literature.

George Steiner's first published book was Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in Contrast, which was a study of the different ideas and ideologies of the Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

George Steiner's best-known book, After Babel, was an early and influential contribution to the field of translation studies.

George Steiner has suggested that Nazism was Europe's revenge on the Jews for inventing conscience.

George Steiner has won numerous awards for his fiction and poetry, including:.