Johann Beer was largely ignored by scholars of German literature until Richard Alewyn's monograph on the Austrian writer was published in 1932. This book, a masterpiece of literary detective work, together with Hans F. Menck's 1931 dissertation, established Beer's authorship of more than twenty picaresque and "political" novels written under a variety of pseudonyms. Now Beer is regarded as the most talented seventeenth-century successor of that century's greatest German novelist, Johann Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, by whom Beer was profoundly influenced. After his death Beer was primarily known to the scholarly world as a musician and composer; but, first with Alewyn's groundbreaking book, which portrayed Beer as a natural artist whose ingenious humor and remarkable realism set him apart from his contemporaries, and now with the publication of a scholarly edition of his works (1981- ), Beer is being given his due as a major prose writer of the German baroque...