George Steiner.
george steiner, born 1929
PROFESSOR OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
George Steiner’s family fled from Nazism first to Paris, and then to New York via Genoa. Steiner obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago at the age of 18. He took his D.Phil at Oxford University, with a Rhodes Scholarship. He then worked at The Economist newspaper for four years, writing on foreign policy and Angle American relations. He spent two years at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton University. He then joined Cambridge University as a founding Fellow at the newly-established Churchill College. He clashed with established figures in the English department, and his application to become a University lecturer was rejected. Churchill College, however, stood by him throughout his life. In 1964 he was appointed to the Chair in Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva, a post he held for 25 years. He received many honours, and is regarded as one of the leading literary critics of his time. He retired to Cambridge, where he died at the age of 90 in 2020.
Click below to view his life story:
Source: A re-formatted transcript of an interview by Prof. Alan Macfarlane, reproduced with the permission of Prof. Macfarlane in 2020.