George Steiner was born in Paris in 1929 to Austrian parents. His Jewish family left for New York in 1940. He became critic, essayist, translator and teacher, held the chair of comparative literature at the University of Geneva, and later lived in Cambridge. From 1966 to 1997 he was the senior book reviewer at The New Yorker, succeeding Edmund Wilson.
His subject was language: what it builds and what it cannot prevent. He kept returning to the Holocaust and to the unsettling fact that a civilisation steeped in great books still produced it. In Grammars of Creation, drawn from his 1990 Gifford Lectures, he marvels that the same human speech can love and forgive and also torture. He wrote fiction too. The novella The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H. (1981) sends Israeli Nazi hunters after an aged Hitler in the Amazon, and it remained a controversial book.
Among his best-known works are Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1959), The Death of Tragedy (1961), the translation study After Babel (1975) and the memoir Errata. In 1974 he gave the CBC Massey Lectures, published as Nostalgia for the Absolute. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1998.
On WebToTell he appears through The Trial. He did not write Kafka's novel; he contributed the introduction to the 1992 Everyman's Library edition, which uses the Muir translation. To read Steiner himself, start with Errata: An Examined Life, a memoir that revisits his main preoccupations through episodes from his life. After Babel is the heavier, more rewarding next step.
