Heinrich von Kleist’s birthday

German writer Heinrich von Kleist, one of the leading lights of German literary romanticism, was born on Oct. 18, 1777. Kleist’s body of work ranges from drama – with famous plays such as Penthesilea and The Prince of Homburg – to works of short fiction such as “The Marquise of O” and “Michael Kohlhaas.”

UIUC’s Library has a number of books by Kleist, both in the original German and in English translation.

The Library also has a number of critical works related to Kleist’s varied body of work: you can see such works in our catalog here.

Some other resources related to Kleist:

• Works of Kleist’s available at the Internet Archive and at Project Gutenberg

• A primarily German-language site dedicated to Kleist

• A list of winners of the Kleist Prize (an annual German literary prize)

• Kleist’s essay “On the Marionette Theatre” (which Susan Sontag once called “the first great essay on the dance”)

• An interesting article in praise of Kleist by Michael Dirda

• A review of Archipelago Books’ recent publication of Kleist’s Selected Prose

• Eric Rohmer’s 1976 adaptation of The Marquise of O, available in the Undergraduate Library’s Media Collection