[2][3][4][5] Auerbach, who was Jewish and born in Berlin, was trained in the German philological tradition and eventually became, along with Leo Spitzer, one of its best-known scholars.

[6] After participating as a combatant in World War I, he earned a doctorate in 1921 at the University of Greifswald, served as librarian at the Prussian State Library for some years,[7] and in 1929 became a member of the philology faculty at the University of Marburg, publishing a well-received study titled Dante: Poet of the Secular World.

Exiled from Nazi Germany, he took up residence in Istanbul, Turkey, where he wrote Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), generally considered his masterwork.

He was appointed professor of Romance philology at Yale University in 1950, a position he held until his death in 1957 in Wallingford, Connecticut.

Its range covers literary masterpieces from Homer and the Old Testament right through to Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust, although as Auerbach says apologetically at the end of the book, for reasons of space he had to leave out a great deal of medieval literature as well as some crucial modern writers like Pascal and Baudelaire.