Discover the Best Books Written by George Steiner

Francis George Steiner was a Franco-American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, and educator. He wrote extensively about the relationship between language, literature, and society and the impact of the Holocaust. An article in The Guardian described Steiner as a "polyglot and polymath." Among his admirers, Steiner is ranked "among the great minds in today's literary world." English novelist A. S. Byatt described him as a "late, late, late Renaissance man ... a European metaphysician with an instinct for the driving ideas of our time".

Harriet Harvey-Wood, a former literature director of the British Council, described him as a "magnificent lecturer – prophetic and doom-laden [who would] turn up with half a page of scribbled notes and never refer to them." Steiner was a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva (1974–94), Professor of Comparative Literature and Fellow at the University of Oxford (1994–95), Professor of Poetry at Harvard University (2001–02), and an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.

George Steiner was born in 1929 in Paris to Viennese Jewish parents Else (née Franzos) and Frederick Georg Steiner. He had an elder sister, Ruth Lilian, who was born in Vienna in 1922. Else Steiner was a Viennese grande dame. Frederick Steiner had been a senior lawyer at Austria's central bank, the Oesterreichische Nationalbank; he was an investment banker in Paris.

Five years before Steiner's birth, his father had moved his family from Austria to France to escape the growing threat of anti-Semitism. He believed Jews were "endangered guests wherever they went" and taught his children languages. Steiner grew up with three mother tongues: German, English, and French; his mother was multilingual and would often "begin a sentence in one language and end it in another."

When he was six years old, his father, who believed in the importance of classical education, taught him to read the Iliad in original Greek. His mother, for whom "self-pity was nauseating," helped Steiner overcome a handicap he had been born with, a withered right arm. Instead of allowing him to become left-handed, she insisted he uses his right hand as an able-bodied person would. Steiner's first formal education took place at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly in Paris. 

In 1940, during World War II, Steiner's father was in New York City on an economic mission for the French government when the Germans were preparing to invade France. He got permission from his family to travel to New York. Steiner, his mother, and his sister Lilian left by ship from Genoa. Within a month of their move, the Nazis occupied Paris, and of the many Jewish children in Steiner's class at school, he was one of only two who survived the war.

Again, his father's insight saved his family, making Steiner feel like a survivor and profoundly influenced his later writings. "My whole life has been about death, remembering, and the Holocaust." Steiner became a "grateful wanderer," saying, "Trees have roots, and I have legs; I owe my life to that." He spent the rest of his school years at the Lycée Français de New York in Manhattan and became a United States citizen in 1944.

After high school, Steiner went to the University of Chicago after high school, where he studied literature, mathematics, and physics and obtained a BA in 1948. This was followed by an MA degree from Harvard University in 1950. He then attended Balliol College, Oxford, on a Rhodes Scholarship.

After his doctoral thesis at Oxford, a draft of The Death of Tragedy (later published by Faber and Faber), was rejected, Steiner took time off from his studies to teach English at Williams College and to work as the lead writer for the London-based weekly publication The Economist between 1952 and 1956. During this time, he met Zara Shakow, a New Yorker of Lithuanian descent. She had also studied at Harvard, and they met in London at the suggestion of their former professors. 

"The professors had had a bet ... that we would get married if we ever met." They married in 1955 when he received his DPhil from Oxford University. They have a son, David Steiner (who served as New York State's Commissioner of Education from 2009 to 2011), and a daughter, Deborah Steiner (Professor of Classics at Columbia University). He last lived in Cambridge, England. Zara Steiner died on 13 February 2020, ten days after her husband.