INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME 1 The papers presented in Volume 1 cover the period from Einstein's birth until he obtained a position at the Swiss Patent Office. These texts, for the most part previously unpublished, provide a documentary record of Einstein's early life and intellectual development. To supplement the documentation available from the Einstein Archive, we have included items from many other sources, most of which are in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, where Einstein spent his youth, and in the United States, where several of his descendants live. Collections of letters, school and university records, government dossiers, commercial records, and newspaper files, located in archives and libraries or privately held, yielded substantial new material. Two-thirds of the documents printed here were found in the course of our search, as was much of the information used in the annotation of this volume. The most important new material is a collection of fifty-one letters ex- changed between Einstein and Mileva Maric, his future wife, during the period covered by this volume. These letters depict the development of their close relationship, including the birth of a daughter in 1902, a year before their marriage. Less dramatic, but no less significant, are the revelations about Einstein's early scientific ideas in his forty-one letters to Maric. There are still many gaps in the documentary record of Einstein's early years: no letters to his parents have been found, for example, and the period before 1896 is very sparsely represented. Because of this limited documenta- tion, and because of the large amount of misinformation about Einstein's youth, we have included the opening sections of an unpublished biographical memoir by Einstein's sister, Maja Winteler-Einstein. These sections are the single most valuable source of information about his family background and his years at home. They are included in the front matter, along with editorial footnotes that provide additional biographical information. The rel- evant portions of all third-party letters and other contemporary documents that have come to our attention and that contain significant information about Einstein are printed as texts. The Appendixes document Einstein's curricula at the schools he attended. A map and a detailed Chronology will help readers to follow Einstein's activities during the period covered in this volume.