Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) was virtually forgotten until the beginning of the twentieth century, when Rilke, Kafka, and Thomas Mann hailed him as a master of German prose and European dramatic literature. During Kleist's lifetime, Goethe, sensing in the younger man his greatest rival, carefully withheld from him the endorsement that would have established his reputation. At the age of thirty-four, impoverished and in debt, despairing of the literary honor he had hoped to gain for his family, Kleist consummated a suicide pact with an incurably ill married woman. Ironically, the spectacular circumstances of his death helped to rescue his oeuvre--primarily eight stories and eight plays--from oblivion.