Eric A. Blackall

Blackall, by Richard Ruppel

Eric Albert Blackall (19 October 1914 – 16 November 1989) was an English scholar and critic of German and Austrian literature.

Biography

Blackall was born in London, the son of a grocer. He attended the Latymer Upper School on a scholarship. Blackall earned the B.A. degree in 1936 and the M.A. degree in 1940 from Cambridge University. The University of Vienna awarded him the Ph.D. in 1938, and Cambridge University granted him the Litt. D. in 1960. He taught briefly at the University of Basel (1938-39). From 1939 till 1958 he worked at the University of Cambridge. In 1965 he took a whole year off and enjoyed a Guggenheim Fellowship. Later at Cornell, Blackall became successively chairman of the Department of German Literature, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German Literature, a position established for him in 1967. He retired in 1985.

Blackall translated Goethe's Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, and later, with Vida Harford, the libretto to Alban Berg’s Wozzeck.

He died of cardiopulmonary arrest at Tompkins Community Hospital in Ithaca on November 16, 1989.

Honors and legacy

In 1973, Austria awarded him the Cross of Honor, mainly for saving Arthur Schnitzler's manuscripts and letters before World War II.

He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society.

Works

• Adalbert Stifter: A Critical Study (1948)
• The Emergence of German as a Literary Language (1959)
• Goethe and the Novel (1976)
• The Novels of the German Romantics (1983)

External links

• Works by Eric A. Blackall at Hathi Trust
• Works by Eric A. Blackall at JSTOR
• Eric A. Blackall Papers, ca. 1939-1989 at Cornell University
• Saved from the Nazis in 1938: Schnitzler Archive to Remain in Cambridge