Gustav Schilling

Born in Dresden on November 25, 1766, Friedrich Gustav Schilling was a German poet and man of letters who also spent many years in military service. Biographical sources describe him as entering the military in 1781, serving in the artillery, and later leaving as a captain in 1807 before returning more fully to literary work.

He published poetry, stories, and novels, and some of his early poems appeared in Friedrich Schiller's journal Thalia. He wrote under the pseudonym "Zebedäus Kukuk, der jüngere," and is remembered as a prolific belletrist whose fiction found readers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

After periods away from Saxony, he lived again in Dresden, where he died on July 30, 1839. Today he is mainly of interest as a vivid example of the many German writers who moved between public service, magazine culture, and the fast-growing market for popular literature.