If you've managed to pass several semesters of college German, you've almost certainly encountered Theodor Storm (1817-1888) in the original. He's as venerated a classic of German literature as Maupassant of French or Turgenev of Russian, and like those two masters, his finest works were 'novellas' -- long short stories with certain formal structural elements. Storm was extremely well-known to American and English readers in the 19th Century, but his fame has faded during the 20th. This translation of eight of his fifty-plus stories, including his acknowledged masterpiece "Der Schimmelreiter - The Rider on the White Horse", by the American poet James Wright, makes a convincing case that Storm's work is still worth reading.Like Goethe, Storm spent much of his energy in public life. He was a jurist by training. As a young 'nationalist' on behalf of the German-speaking population of Danish-governed Schleswig, Storm was vociferous enough to get exiled to Prussia, and then to a mountain village in Thuringia, where he worked as a judge and wrote many of his novellas. In 1864, Prussia seized control of Schleswig and Storm hurried home to be acclaimed as "Landsvogt" in his native region, an administrative position responsible for civil order and justice. Eventually, despite personal tragedies, he rose to the position of Chief Justice of the Court of Appeals.No one ever wrote love stories more redolent of spring blossoms and sunshine than Theodor Storm. His prose in such tales is as mellow as vintage Riesling. For a man with feet planted stoutly in the running of life in the present, Storm had a musician's ear for the language of nostalgia. The closest comparison in American literature might be to Washington Irving or Nathaniel Hawthorne, without the nagging Puritan guilt. Once in a while, mystery verging on the supernatural colors some of Storm's scenes, and even more rarely a trace of mockery of rustic life appears. After the gentle climate of Storm's early stories, however, in The Rider on the White Horse, he lives up to his surname. That ninety page story is set among the dikes and dunes of Frisia, on the edge of the North Sea; it portrays the indefatigable struggle of folk against the fury of waves and weather, to preserve their hard-won reclaimed soil. It's also a kind of Faust/Prometheus story, of a man who triumphs and loses in the same act. It's a powerful, passionate story, one of the most evocative in any language.