Francis George Steiner, FBA (born April 23, 1929) is a French-born American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, and educator. He has written 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", saying that he is either "often credited with recasting the role of the critic", or a "pretentious namedropper" whose "range comes at the price of inaccuracy" and "complacency". Among his admirers, Steiner is ranked "among the great minds in today's literary world."

In 1956 Steiner returned to the United States, where for two years he was a scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He also held a Fulbright professorship in Innsbruck, Austria from 1958 to 1959. In 1959, he was appointed Gauss Lecturer at Princeton, where he lectured for another two years. He then became a founding fellow of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge in 1961. Steiner was initially not well received at Cambridge by the English faculty. Many disapproved of this charismatic "firebrand with a foreign accent" and questioned the relevance of the Holocaust he constantly referred to in his lectures. Bryan Cheyette, professor of 20th-century literature at the University of Southampton said that at the time, "Britain [...] didn't think it had a relationship to the Holocaust; its mythology of the war was rooted in the Blitz, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain." While Steiner received a professorial salary, he was never made a full professor at Cambridge with the right to examine. He had the option of leaving for professorships in the United States, but Steiner's father objected, saying that Hitler, who said no one bearing their name would be left in Europe, would then have won. Steiner remained in England because "I'd do anything rather than face such contempt from my father." He was elected an Extraordinary Fellow at Cambridge in 1969. After several years as a freelance writer and occasional lecturer, Steiner accepted the post of Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva in 1974; he held this post for 20 years, teaching in four languages. He lived by Goethe's maxim that "no monoglot truly knows his own language." He became Professor Emeritus at Geneva University on his retirement in 1994, and an Honorary Fellow at Balliol College at Oxford University in 1995. He has since held the positions of the first Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative European Literature and Fellow of St Anne's College at Oxford University from 1994 to 1995, and Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University from 2001 to 2002. Steiner has been called "an intelligent and intellectual critic and essayist." He was active on undergraduate publications while at the University of Chicago and later become a regular contributor of reviews and articles to many journals and newspapers including the Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian. He has written for The New Yorker for over thirty years, contributing over two hundred reviews. While Steiner generally takes things very seriously, he also reveals an unexpected deadpan humor: when he was once asked if he had ever read anything trivial as a child, he replied, Moby-Dick.

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