Of the young Heinrich Laube a contemporary wrote that he "jumped into literature like an adventure [jumping] in through the window"; but when Laube died, less than two months before his seventy-eighth birthday, his initially radical nature had been tamed. His prolific literary production was accompanied by a distinguished career as director of Vienna's renowned Burgtheater. He was a man of letters whose output encompassed journalism, literary criticism, fiction, and drama. He insisted on situating literature within social, geographic, historical, and political reality. Laube's early attempts to redefine the nature of literature, undertaken in radical-liberal rebellion against the classical aesthetic, earned him fame and notoriety, and his self-stylization as a rebel contributed to his troubles with the police and censorship authorities from the mid 1830s into the 1840s; it also made his name as a "Young German" writer. His works often do not conform to traditional genre classifications...