Salomon Geßner was the first writer of German fiction to achieve international popularity and fame in his own time. His idylls (two collections, 1756 and 1772) and his prose epic Der Tod Abels (1758; translated as The Death of Abel, 1761) were immensely successful in the later eighteenth century and influential throughout Europe well into the nineteenth. Published in many editions and translated (often, as in the English translations, quite freely) into many languages, his works moved and delighted countless readers. His admirers included Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Maximilien Robespierre, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Benjamin Franklin. His works are central documents of pre-Romantic sensibility that did much to form a taste for the beauty and freedom of nature, peaceful rural life, domestic felicity, moral sentiment, and simple language. They encouraged the conviction that natural innocence and true civilized values existed in the countryside, and particularly in Geßner's...