E. T. A. Hoffmann

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was born Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann on 24 January 1776 in Germany, and worked as a jurist, composer, and music critic before his fiction made him central to the Romantic movement. His short story "The Sandman" became a pioneering work of horror, and his novella Mademoiselle de Scuderi is regarded as one of the earliest examples of crime fiction. He wrote The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, which Tchaikovsky turned into a ballet, and his stories became the basis for Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann, in which a fictionalized version of Hoffmann appears as…