Johann Ludwig Tieck

Johann Ludwig Tieck (31 May 1773 – 28 April 1853) was a German poet, translator, editor, novelist, writer of Novellen, and critic, who was one of the founding fathers of the Romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Tieck was born in Berlin, the son of a rope-maker. His siblings were the sculptor Christian Friedrich Tieck and the poet Sophie Tieck. He was educated at the Friedrichswerdersches Gymnasium (), where he learned Greek and Latin, like most preparatory schools required. He also began learning Italian at a very young age from a grenadier he became acquainted with. Through this friendship, Tieck was given a firsthand look at the poor, which could be linked to his work as a Romanticist. Later, he attended the universities of Halle, Göttingen and Erlangen. At Göttingen, he studied Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama.

In 1794 he returned to Berlin, and attempted to make a living by writing. He contributed a number of short stories (1795–1798) to the series of Straussfedern, published by the bookseller C. F. Nicolai and originally edited by J. K. A. Musäus, and wrote Abdallah (1796) and a novel in letters, William Lovell (3 vols. 1795–1796).

Tieck's transition to Romanticism is seen in the series of plays and stories published under the title Volksmärchen von Peter Lebrecht (3 vols., 1797), a collection which contains the fairy-tale Der blonde Eckbert, which blends exploration of the paranoiac mind with the realm of the supernatural, and the witty dramatic satire on Berlin literary taste, Der gestiefelte Kater. With his school and college friend Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773–1798), he planned the novel Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (vols. i–ii. 1798), which, with Wackenroder's Herzensergiessungen (1796), was the first expression of the romantic enthusiasm for old German art.

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