author
Otto Heller
1863–1941
A German-born scholar who built his career in the United States, he wrote about major European writers and intellectual rebels with energy and range. Best known for Prophets of Dissent, he spent decades teaching literature at Washington University in St. Louis.
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About the author
Born on July 4, 1863, in Saxony, Otto Heller became a German-born American author and academic. He studied in Prague, Munich, Vienna, and Berlin, then came to the United States in 1883 and began his teaching career soon afterward.
Heller is chiefly remembered as a professor of German and modern European literature at Washington University in St. Louis, where archival records show he taught from the 1890s onward. His writing focused on European literary and intellectual history, and Prophets of Dissent is the work most often associated with his name.
He died on July 29, 1941, in St. Louis. A concise public record exists for him, but readily available sources offer only limited personal detail, so the picture that remains is mostly of a dedicated teacher and literary scholar rather than a widely documented public figure.