The German author Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) was perhaps the most versatile and productive writer of the German romantic movement.

Ludwig Tieck was born in Berlin on May 5, 1773. His intellectual and imaginative gifts were evident from early youth, when he considered himself a rationalist and follower of the Enlightenment. In 1792 he began his university studies, first at Halle and then at Göttingen, where he began his first novel, William Lovell, completed in 1796. This is the story of a young Englishman who begins as an idealist but falls into a life of sensuality and various misdeeds. After he has seduced and abandoned the sister of a friend, the friend seeks him out and eventually kills him in a duel.

In 1793 Tieck, together with the young writer Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, began a wandering tour of southern Germany, where they discovered the riches of medieval German culture. On the basis...