Professor Ralph Freedman

Ralph Freedman was born in Hamburg, Germany, and emigrated to the United States in 1940. After serving in the United States Army during World War II, he was graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle. He holds a master's degree in philosophy from Brown University and a doctorate in comparative literature from Yale. Widely recognized as an important Hesse scholar, he has taught at the University of Iowa and, since 1965, at Princeton. He has also been a visiting professor at a number of universities, including the University of Wisconsin, SUNY at Buffalo, and the University of Southern California.

Freedman has studied Hesse's manuscripts on deposit in Germany and Switzerland for several years and has traveled throughout the region of Hesse's homelands. In addition to numerous articles and reviews, he is the author of a novel, Divided, and a literary study, The Lyrical Novel: Studies in Hermann Hesse, André Gide, and Virginia Woolf. He has also edited and contributed to a volume of essays on Virginia Woolf.