Autographs
“Herman Grimm” Autograph Letter Signed Famous Author
HERMAN FRIEDRICH GRIMM (1828–1901). German Author and Art Historian.

He was the son of Wilhelm and Dorothea Grimm.The younger of the famous “Grimm Brothers”
1870-Dated, Autograph Letter Signed, “Herman Grimm,” in German, 1 page, 8” x 10” headed, “His Excellency,” Choice Extremely Fine. This original letter is dated 1870, written and signed by Herman Grimm, not translated, nicely written in deep vivid ink upon very clean lightly folded from mailing period paper. It has a perfect, deep brown large 2.5” long autograph, worthy of a fine literary collection.
Herman Friedrich Grimm (1828–1901) was the second son of Wilhelm, the younger of the famous “Grimm Brothers” and their Fairy Tail fame.

It is not quite accurate historically to credit Grimm with introducing the term “Essay” into the German literary vocabulary, but he created a new style of essay writing, and he was the person most instrumental in gaining popular acceptance for this genre. Acknowledging his debt to the inspirational example of Ralph Waldo Emerson, to whom he had dedicated his first collection of II Essays (1859) “with cordial admiration,” he stated retrospectively in 1890 that “the real essay nowadays has to deal with something generally understandable and do so quickly, fluently, and as a sequence of individually focused insights,” which have emerged from many-sided investigations “as suggestive samplings rather than in their all-inclusive completeness.”

He produced a large variety of essays and most notably in the 25 lectures he gave in 1874–75 (published as Goethe in 1876–77) as the first professor of aesthetics and modern art history at a German university, that of Berlin. It is both the rich life of the exceptional individual and his widely productive impact on his age.

Grimm published his essays discriminately in the leading conservative periodicals— Menzel’s Literaturblatt (Literary page), Vossische Zeitung (Voss’ newspaper), Haym’s Preussische Jahrbücher (Prussian yearbooks), Julius Rodenberg’s Deutsche Rundschau (German review) or as introductions to books he liked. He then collected his work with almost predictable regularity and, from 1874, in an unchanging format. That year his Neue Essays über Kunst und Literatur (1865; New essays on art and literature) appeared in an augmented edition of some 500 pages under the title of Fünfzehn Essays (Fifteen essays). Three more collections (1875, 1882, 1890) of 15 essays followed, and finally three volumes of Fragmente (1900 and 1902).