He wrote the book, hailed as a fundamental work in literary studies: Who is Erich Auerbach?

(1892-1957) German philologist. He is the author of Mimesis, which is considered the most competent product in the field of stylistic (stylistic) and linguistic criticism. He was born in Berlin, Germany. He studied law, art history, Latin, and Romance languages. He spent a period of study spanning the years before and after World War I and spanning several German universities. He worked as a librarian at the Prussian State University in 1920. Between 1929 and 1935 he was a professor of Romani philology at the University of Marburg. When the Nazis came to power, he was expelled from the university. He came to Turkey in 1936 and took office at Istanbul University. From 1936 to 1947 he taught at the Romance Languages Department. He went to the USA in 1948. In 1950 he worked as a professor of French and Romance languages at Yale University.

He wrote books on Italian, French, and Medieval Latin literature and historical criticism. He translated Vico's Scienza Nuova into German.

His most important work, Mimesis, has been translated into Spanish, English, Italian, and Hebrew.

Auerbach is one of the practitioners of stylistic and linguistic criticism inspired by Croce's theory of the identity of language and art, and that language is style and individual creation and is only embodied in literary works. Leo Spitzer is the theorist of this criticism movement, which has gained an identical meaning to the history of literature in Germany. Auerbach, on the other hand, gave the most competent example in practice. He analyzed the works of writers from various periods such as Dante, Racine, Homer, and Proust with this method. He worked on individual texts with the "close reading" method. He handled these works with a simultaneous and diachronic approach and identified trends that intersect in a very complex way and complement each other. By making use of linguistic observations, words, and syntax, he was able to establish a clear and understandable link between these data and the results he obtained. Thus, he obtained a literary, social, and cultural history explanation based on individual texts.

Although stylistic criticism has been criticized in the history of criticism in terms of the results it has reached, he is Auerbach who evaluates and realizes the purpose of this understanding in the best way with his Mimesis work.