During his brief but intense creative life J. M. R. Lenz wrote some of the most intriguing literary works of the eighteenth century. Before succumbing to madness in 1777 he produced a body of work-including lyric poetry, four dramas, several important essays, excellent adaptations of Plautus, and a novella, as well as a rich legacy of fragments and unpublished pieces--that has helped to define the literary era of the Sturm und Drang. No writer of the period has been "rediscovered" as regularly as Lenz, who attracted the attention and emulation of the Romantics, the "Jung Deutschen" (Young Germans), the naturalists, the expressionists, Frank Wedekind, Bertolt Brecht, and, most recently, Heinar Kipphardt. The scenic techniques he developed in his plays, which with one exception were not performed during his lifetime, have served as models for succeeding generations of playwrights. Notorious in his own time, his reputation faded so rapidly that...