Ralph Freedman (1920-2016) was an author, literary theorist, and professor of comparative literature.

A Jewish refugee from Germany, Freedman emigrated to England in early 1939, and the United States in 1940. He served in the U.S. Army, in intelligence in the field during World War II in Tunisia and Italy and, at the end of the war, in a counterintelligence team in Austria. His two novels, Divided (1948) and Rue the Day (2009), were based on Freedman's war experiences; the former earned him the Lewis & Clark Northwest Award offered by E.P. Dutton in 1947. After graduating from the University of Washington, Freedman received an M.A. in philosophy from Brown in 1950 and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale in 1954.

As a literary theorist, Freedman's research focused on lyric and prose fiction from the late 18th century through the 20th century, primarily English, German and French literature. He formed the governing board of senior fellows for a new national school of literary criticism at the University of California-Irvine in 1975. His published works in literary criticism include a revision of his dissertation "The Lyrical Novel: Studies in Hermann Hesse, Andre Gide and Virginia Woolf" (1963, Princeton University Press). Freedman wrote the biographies "Hermann Hesse: Pilgrim of Crisis" (1978), which was translated into German and Italian, and "Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke" (1996), which he began to research and write while at Princeton with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980 and which was published after his retirement. A prolific essayist, Freedman also edited "Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity." He translated into English Sten Nadolny's novel "Die Entdeckung der Langsamkeit," which was published in 1987 as "The Discovery of Slowness." His works have been translated into multiple languages, including German, Italian, French, Korean, Spanish and Chinese.

Freedman taught at the University of Iowa for eight years, followed by a long tenure at Princeton University from 1965 to 1988 where he co-organized the university's comparative literature program into the Department of Comparative Literature in 1975. He taught for two post-retirement years at Emory University. Freedman held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and was active in professional societies such as the Modern Language Association and the American Comparative Literature Association.