author
Gerardus Henri Betz
1850–1900
A Dutch lawyer and writer who moved easily between scholarship and storytelling, he published fiction like Walewein and the novella Marathon while also writing about the cultural life of The Hague. His work offers a glimpse of late 19th-century Dutch literary taste, where history, legend, and everyday society all meet.
1 Audiobook
Marathon
by Gerardus Henri Betz
About the author
Born in Rotterdam on December 28, 1850, Gerardus Henri Betz was the son of the Dutch statesman Gerardus Henri Betz. He studied law at Leiden University, where he earned his doctorate in 1874, and later lived and worked in The Hague.
Alongside his legal career, he wrote literature and historical pieces. Works connected with his name include Walewein (1890), the novella Marathon, and Het Haagsche leven in de tweede helft der zeventiende eeuw, published in 1900. Taken together, they suggest a writer drawn both to imaginative narrative and to the social and cultural history of the Netherlands.
He died in The Hague on September 1, 1900. Although he is not widely known today, his surviving books still show the range of a fin-de-siècle Dutch author who could turn from legend to contemporary-style fiction to historical observation.