Michael Kohlhaas: A Tale from an Old Chronicle

Toward the middle of the sixteenth century there lived on the banks of the Havel a horse-dealer named Michael Kohlhaas - "one of the most upright and at the same time one of the most terrible men of his day."Cheated of two horses by a petty nobleman and denied justice by every court and prince he petitions, Kohlhaas at last takes the law into his own hands, and his righteous fury sets a whole country ablaze.Written in 1810 and drawn from a real chronicle, Heinrich von Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas is the definitive tale of wrath - a hard, headlong, unbearably modern study of an ordinary man who would rather see the world burn than let an injustice stand. It is Kleist's masterpiece and one of the greatest novellas ever written.Given here in Frances H. King's public-domain 1914 translation, freshly typeset behind an original mixed-media cover illustration by JVB Atelier Designs.