Von Schiller, Friedrich

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller--dramatist, poet, novelist, translator and historian--was born in 1759 in Marbach and died of tuberculosis in Weimar in 1805. The son of an army officer, he was forced to enter a military academy and later became an army surgeon in Stuttgart. In 1782, the Duke of Wurttemberg heard about his play, The Robbers, and forbade him to write. Schiller deserted and fled to Mannheim, where he made his living as a court playwright, and then Leipzig, where his History of the Revolt of the United Netherlands (1788) led to his appointment as professor at the Universit...