Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg

Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg was an Austrian-born writer and traveler, born on February 21, 1851, in or near Vienna and dead on May 17, 1918, in Tribschen near Lucerne. He is best known as a travel writer, and English- and German-language sources also describe him as an Austrian–American author who spent much of his life moving between countries and cultures.

Alongside his writing, he served as consul of Venezuela in Switzerland from 1888 to 1918. Sources credit him with an impressively large body of work, including 29 books and nearly 700 journal articles, much of it shaped by his travels and his curiosity about places, people, and everyday life around the world.

Although he was widely read in his own time, modern sources also note that surprisingly little is firmly known about parts of his personal background. That mystery adds a certain fascination to his work: he comes across as a well-traveled observer whose books aimed to bring distant parts of the world closer to his readers.