In Anton Reiser, the critic and educator Karl Philipp Moritz (1756-1793) turned his early life into fiction and, according to his translator Ritchie Robertson, created 'one of the most memorable experiences German literature has to offer'.A masterpiece of emotional extremism and unsparing self-analysis, it tells the story of a gifted outsider driven to near-madness by exclusion from middle-class privilege and academic success. Brought up by members of a mystical protestant sect, apprenticed to a pious but tyrannical tradesman, and humiliated as a charity-pupil at school, Reiser escapes into an obsession with literature and the theatre, discovers a strange underworld of impoverished artisan intellectuals, and undertakes long wanderings in pursuit of a theatrical career.