Georg Forster became an important eighteenth-century German author rather by accident after growing up and beginning his writing career in England. He saw more of the world than any other German writer of his time and played a significant role in transmitting non-European cultures to the contemporary audience. A cosmopolitan intellectual who was nowhere truly at home, he became famous for his account of Capt. James Cook's second Pacific voyage, infamous for his role in the attempt to turn part of the German Rhineland into a republic on the French model in 1792-1793. He made his mark on German letters with his travel books, his translations from English and French, and his urbane essays on topics in anthropology, natural history, history, politics, art, and literature. Only three years after his death Friedrich Schlegel was calling him a "classic" German writer.

Until he was nearly twenty-five years old Forster's...