The book sets out to draw on the evidence about the creative approaches of authors documented in their manuscripts as a source for achieving a better understanding of those authors. The core thesis is that in the 18th century Klopstock, Hamann and Herder were instances of a focus shift in the creative process away from the work itself and toward the author, and that since then writing has been imbued with an ambivalence between author-centered and work-centered approaches. In author-centered writing, literature and language are freed of external purposes and serve the inner renewal of the author and the like-minded reader. Philological editing has long been dominated by the work-centered approach and has only recently accommodated author-related aspects, notably in the text-genesis approach.