Karl Philipp Moritz, German novelist, man of letters, and aesthetician, was born to poor and radically Quietist (Protestant) parents. Moritz started his career as an apprentice hatmaker at the age of twelve and ended up as an intimate of Johann von Goethe, Friederich Schiller, and Johann Georg Herder, and as professor of archaeology and aesthetics at the Berlin academy of art as well as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. A prolific writer, his works include the psychological novel Anton Reiser (1785–1790), a fictionalized account of his own passage from his narrow religious origins to the center of the German Enlightenment; the satirical novel Andreas Hartknopf (1786); a widely read account of The Travels of a German in England in 1782 (1783); an Essay toward a Practical Logic for Children (1786); an English grammar for Germans (1784); as well as a work on German prosody (1786) and...