AUERBACH, ERICH

born Nov. 9, 1892, Berlin, Ger. died Oct. 13, 1957, Wallingford, Conn., U.S. educator and scholar of Romance literatures and languages. After gaining a doctorate in philology at the University of Greifswald, Germany, in 1921, Auerbach served as librarian for the Prussian State Library. From 1927 to 1947 he was professor of Romance philology at the University of Marburg in Germany and at the Turkish State University in Istanbul. He joined the faculty at Yale University in 1947, becoming Sterling professor of Romance philology in 1956. In 194950 he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J. His foremost work was Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953, from the original German edition of 1946), which presents the development of Western literature in terms of the historical qualities of each era.