Richard Plant (July 22, 1910 – March 10, 1998) was a gay Jewish emigre from Nazi Germany, first to Switzerland and then to the U.S., who became a professor at the City College of New York, where he taught German language and literature from 1947 to 1973.

Literature, theater, and the cinema were his primary interests, and his earliest publications, film reviews edited by Siegfried Kracauer, appeared in the left-liberal daily Frankfurter Rundschau.

In the fall of 1930, Plaut briefly transferred to the University of Berlin, where in addition to continuing his studies for one semester he wrote cultural commentaries for various newspapers and worked as an extra in UFA films, including The Threepenny Opera.

Returning to the University of Frankfurt in 1931, he remained active as a journalist and theater extra at a time when courses taught by Jewish professors, including Sommerfeld, were increasingly disrupted by the growing Nazi Students League.

Plant hoped to write a doctoral dissertation on the formula novelist Hedwig Courths-Mahler, but when Sommerfeld rejected this thesis proposal, he decided to transfer again, this time to Basel.

[3] In addition, Plaut authored under his own name a young readers’ book, Die Kiste mit dem großen S. (1936), which was published in Switzerland and also appeared in Dutch translation.

This required mobilizing all available resources and connections, including affidavits of sponsorship by relatives in the U.S. and letters of recommendation written by Paul Tillich and Martin Sommerfeld, both recent emigres now teaching at U.S. universities.

To complete work on his highly autobiographical novel The Dragon in the Forest (1948), Plant was awarded a Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Trust Fellowship,[d] for which he was recommended by Norman Cousins.

[11] Although he was successful enough as a classroom teacher to be granted tenure in 1957 and promotion to full professor in 1970, Plant struggled with condescending colleagues who disparaged his lack of scholarly publications while pooh-poohing his editorial and journalistic contributions.

He resided in Greenwich Village, and summer holidays were spent with his friends Seidlin and Cunz in the mountains at Mallnitz, Austria, or on the beach at Manomet, Massachusetts, where they hobnobbed with the vacationing Hannah Arendt.

The essay commented on the anti-gay dimension of the McCarthy witch hunt of the preceding years,[12] while the stories "are charming, happy-ending vignettes of gay life in New York City and Massachusetts, two of them with interesting black/white encounters.

Following his retirement from university teaching in 1973, Plant was able to devote more time to his own interests, although he continued to offer occasional courses on German literature in translation at the New School for Social Research.