Samuel A. Tannenbaum

Who was Samuel A. Tannenbaum?

Samuel Aaron Tannenbaum was a prolific early-20th-century literary scholar, bibliographer, and palaeographer, best known for his work on William Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Tannenbaum was born in Hungary, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; he emigrated to the United States in 1886, the year he turned fourteen, and became a citizen in 1895. Graduating from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1898, he pursued a career in psychotherapy, with a strong interest in the work of Sigmund Freud. He was part of the circle of early Freud supporters that included Ernest Jones and Sándor Ferenczi, and was connected with early efforts to establish an English-language journal of psychotherapy. He published on medical and psychological subjects, including the books The Psychology of Accidents and The Patient's Dilemma.

He was the editor of the Shakespeare Association Bulletin, and through the first half of the twentieth century produced a wide range of books and articles on Shakespeare and other figures of English Renaissance theatre and literature.