ABOUT THIS BOOK

When Christ, wearied by the heavy burden of the cross, leaned for a moment against a stranger’s doorway, the stranger drove him away and cried, “Walk faster!” To this, Christ replied, “I go, but you will walk until I come again!” So began the legend of the Wandering Jew, which has recurred in many forms of literature and folklore ever since. George K. Anderson, in a book first published in 1965 and immediately hailed as a classic, traces this enduring legend through the ages, from St. John through the Middle Ages to Shelley, Eugène Sue, and the antisemitism of Hitler to recent movies and novels. Though the main elements of the legend are a constant, Anderson shows how changes in emphasis and meaning reflect civilization’s shifting concerns and attitudes over time.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

GEORGE K. ANDERSON, a renowned Anglo-Saxon scholar, was Professor of English at Brown University, where he taught for 45 years. Aided by a Guggenheim Fellowship, Anderson spent 20 years researching the legend of the Wandering Jew. His other books include The Literature of England (1979) and a translation of The Saga of the Volsungs (1982).

REVIEWS

“Energetically written, logically organized, and splendidly produced . . . An original and creative work of scholarship, in which erudition and imagination walk hand in hand.”—American Jewish Historical Quarterly

“Anderson, writing with liveliness and humor, takes Ahasuerus [the Wandering Jew’s most common name] from his house on the road to Golgotha, where he was condemned to endless walking, through centuries to come and climes unknown (one being the moon). Beginning with the Middle Ages the legend developed, reflecting the Zeitgeist and social conditions, and followed the main stream of European history, down to the anti-Semitism of our own times.”—Choice

“[Anderson’s] study asks good questions at this juncture in space and time, when the National Archives is collecting tweets and people are wondering whether their Facebook profiles might be given to historians after they pass away. Anderson’s extended essay provides a useful starting point to consider these issues (of our digital legacies) and our role as media historians in the early twenty-first century. Ultimately, he is right in suggesting that new media technology can help, and not hinder, how historians shape and share their inquiries into the past (and thus into the present).”—H-Net

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. • Dear All, • Biography • Ordinary Morning • At Fifty • A Few Small Gestures of Concern • The Greeks of 1983 • Black Overcoat • Ars Poetica • Fear of Farms • The House of Drink • My Father and Ezra Pound • II. • The Sleep Writer • Narrator with Stranger • The Wave • The Border • Ninth View of the North Sea • First Color Photographers of the War • Beautiful War • At the Blue Table • Note from My Father • Asleep still, I rise • Cleaning the Guns • Reading Yusef • A Drone Poem, Notes For • III. • Our Journey • Island • Waiting for Jane Austen in Walnut Creek, Ohio, at the end of the twentieth century • How the Brain Works • The Map • In the Rubble of the World • Signs Following • Too Much, Too Soon Migraine • In Real Life • The Thing You Can't Forget • A Blessing • In the Sidney Lanier Best Western Motel in Gainesville, Georgia, I think of the great Polish poet • And then I arrive at the powerful green hill • Notes