Born in Paris on 23 April 1929, George Steiner moved with his family to the United States in 1940 and became a naturalized American citizen in 1944. His parents were Frederick George Steiner and Elsie (Franzos) Steiner, Austrian Jews who had left Vienna in 1924 as a result of the rising anti-Semitism: as Steiner writes in Errata: An Examined Life (1997), "With grim clairvoyance, my father perceived the nearing disaster." Steiner's trilingual upbringing in English, French, and German is the source of his triumphs and failures as a critic. His lifelong mission, Steiner explains in Errata, has been "to act as a double or triple agent, seeking to suggest to one great language and literature the necessary presence of the other," a mission that has earned him many disciples but has also "provoked distaste, professional suspicion and marginalization." An unashamed advocate of educational elitism, Steiner is at the same time keen to retain the idea that criticism should be accessible to a "common reader" and is contemptuous of the obscure theoretical writing that he sees as predominant in the academy of the late twentieth century.
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