author
Harvey W. (Harvey Waterman) Hewett-Thayer
b. 1873
A longtime Princeton scholar of German literature, he wrote studies that helped English-speaking readers explore how European writers and traditions shaped one another. His work ranges from Laurence Sterne’s reception in Germany to broader surveys of German fiction and literary history.
1 Audiobook
Laurence Sterne in Germany A Contribution to the Study of the Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Eighteenth Century
by Harvey W. (Harvey Waterman) Hewett-Thayer
About the author
Born in 1873, Harvey Waterman Hewett-Thayer was an American scholar and author whose work centered on German literature and comparative literary study. Records for his books show a career that included major studies such as Laurence Sterne in Germany, The Modern German Novel, An Anthology of German Literature in the Nineteenth Century, Hoffmann: Author of the Tales, and American Literature as Viewed in Germany, 1818–1861.
Available biographical records indicate that he studied at Bowdoin, Harvard, Columbia, and German universities, and that he spent much of his professional life on the faculty of Princeton University. His writing suggests a critic deeply interested in how literature travels across languages and national borders, especially between English and German traditions.
Although detailed personal information is limited in the sources readily available online, Hewett-Thayer emerges as a serious and wide-ranging literary historian. For readers interested in German fiction, Romanticism, and the international life of books, his work offers a thoughtful window into the way authors are read, translated, and reimagined in other cultures.