Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926

A leading German critic of his day and a member of the generation scarred by the First World War, Walter Benjamin's writing career was marked by deep philosophical insights and tumultuous emotional crises. His work has mostly been unavailable in English translations, but this collection marks the first of three proposed volumes of his essays. In his early work, we encounter Benjamin as an idealistic university student and come to see him commenting on the aesthetics of such subjects as morality in children's books, the uses of force and violence, and writers such as Goethe and Dostoyevsky.