author
Otto Heller
1863–1941
A European-born scholar who built his career in the United States, he wrote lively criticism on major modern writers and spent decades teaching literature at Washington University in St. Louis.
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About the author
Born in 1863 in Karlsbad, Bohemia (now Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic), Otto Heller studied in Prague, Munich, Vienna, and Berlin before coming to the United States in 1883. He later earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and began a long academic career that connected classical study with modern European thought.
Heller taught briefly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then became a professor of German language and literature at Washington University in St. Louis in 1892. He is remembered as both an academic and a literary critic, with work that helped introduce readers to important European writers and ideas.
Among his best-known books is Prophets of Dissent, a study of writers including Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy. He also wrote on Henrik Ibsen and other figures in modern literature, bringing a clear, energetic style to serious criticism. He died in 1941.