Johann Karl Wezel's novel Herrmann und Ulrike (1780) was read by his contemporaries and praised for its wit, piquant humor, innovative insight into human motivation, and impeccable style. But his embittered withdrawal from public life, which coincided with the changing aesthetics of emerging German Classicism and Romanticism, caused Wezel to be almost forgotten until 1919. That year Carl Georg von Maaßen edited Herrmann und Ulrike, which he claimed unequivocally to be the best novel of the eighteenth century--echoing a comment made by Christoph Martin Wieland in the year of its original publication. One of the most individualistic personalities of eighteenth-century letters, Wezel gained considerable notoriety as a result of his vindictive satirical attacks on political corruption and abuse of power, on the self-compromising position of writers who were dependent on patronage, on the melancholy sentimentalism that swept over Germany in the late 1760s and 1770s, and because of...