René Wellek (August 22, 1903 – November 10, 1995) was a Czech-American comparative literary critic. Like Erich Auerbach, Wellek was a product of the Central European philological tradition and was known as a "fair-minded critic of critics."
From 1939, the beginning of World War II in Europe, Wellek lived in America. Wellek said the best literary critic must "do what every scientist and scholar does: to isolate his object, in our case, the literary work of art, to contemplate it intently, to analyze, to interpret, and finally to evaluate it by criteria derived from, verified by, buttressed by, as wide a knowledge, as close an observation, as keen a sensibility, as honest a judgment as we can command." According to Wellek, bringing all of literary theory, criticism, and history into consideration allows a critic to achieve "victory over impermanence, relativity, and history."
Wellek was an elected member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
The crowning work of Wellek's career was an eight-volume magnum opus entitled A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950, the last two volumes of which he dictated from his bed in a nursing home at age 92.