The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Wiener, Leo

WIENER, vē'nėr, Leo, Jewish-American author: b. Russia, 26 July 1862. He was educated at the gymnasia of Minsk and Warsaw, at the University of Warsaw and the Polytechnic of Berlin. From the latter city he went to New Orleans, worked in a cotton factory, and later sold fruit in Kansas City, Mo. He then obtained a position as teacher in Odessa, Mo., and afterward a professorship in the University of Missouri, and was next appointed to his present position as assistant professor of Slavonic languages at Harvard. He contributed many etymologies to Webster's New International Dictionary, but his greatest editorial production is the 24-volume compilation of Count Tolstoy's works. Among his other publications are ‘History of Yiddish Literature in the 19th Century’; ‘Anthology of Russian Literature’; ‘Slavic Anthology’; and ‘An Interpretation of the Russian People’ (1915); he has also edited Rosenfeld's ‘Songs from the Ghetto.’