Francis George Steiner,[2] FBA (April 23, 1929 – February 3, 2020)[3][4] was a Franco-American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist and educator.

[7] Harriet Harvey-Wood, a former literature director of the British Council, described him as a "magnificent lecturer – prophetic and doom-laden [who would] turn up with half a page of scribbled notes, and never refer to them".

[9] Frederick Steiner had been a senior lawyer at Austria's central bank, the Oesterreichische Nationalbank;[9] in Paris he was an investment banker.

[10] Five years before Steiner's birth, his father had moved his family from Austria to France to escape the growing threat of anti-Semitism.

[10] Within a month of their move, the Nazis occupied Paris, and of the many Jewish children in Steiner's class at school, he was one of only two who survived the war.

"[7] He spent the rest of his school years at the Lycée Français de New York in Manhattan, and became a United States citizen in 1944.

[4] After high school, Steiner went to the University of Chicago, where he studied literature as well as mathematics and physics, and obtained a BA degree in 1948.

He had the option of leaving for professorships in the United States, but Steiner's father objected, saying that Hitler, who said no one bearing their name would be left in Europe, would then have won.

"[3] He was active on undergraduate publications while at the University of Chicago and later became a regular contributor of reviews and articles to many journals and newspapers including The Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian.

[17] While Steiner generally took things very seriously, he also revealed an unexpected deadpan humor: when he was once asked if he had ever read anything trivial as a child, he replied, Moby-Dick.

[7] Steiner was regarded as a polymath and is often credited with having recast the role of the critic by having explored art and thought unbounded by national frontiers or academic disciplines.

Steiner believed that nationalism is too inherently violent to satisfy the moral prerogative of Judaism, having said "that because of what we are, there are things we can't do.

"[18] Central to Steiner's thinking, he stated, "is my astonishment, naïve as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to love, to build, to forgive, and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate.

He published original essays and books that address the anomalies of contemporary Western culture, issues of language and its "debasement" in the post-Holocaust age.

Portage to San Cristobal, in which Jewish Nazi hunters find Adolf Hitler (the "A.H." of the novella's title) alive in the Amazon jungle thirty years after the end of World War II, explored ideas about the origins of European anti-semitism first expounded by Steiner in his critical work In Bluebeard's Castle (1971).

[7] No Passion Spent (1996) is a collection of essays on topics as diverse as Kierkegaard, Homer in translation, Biblical texts, and Freud's dream theory.

Errata: An Examined Life (1997) is a semi-autobiography,[3] and Grammars of Creation (2001), based on Steiner's 1990 Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Glasgow, explores a range of subjects from cosmology to poetry.