Robert Walser

Born in Biel, Switzerland, on April 15, 1878, Robert Walser wrote in German and spent much of his early life moving between modest jobs, including work as a clerk, copyist, and servant. Those experiences fed the voice that runs through his fiction: alert, humble, playful, and sharply observant of everyday life.

During the years he lived in Berlin in the early 1900s, he published the novels The Tanners, The Assistant, and Jakob von Gunten, along with many short prose pieces. His writing often follows wandering minds, servants, clerks, and outsiders, and later readers came to see him as an important influence on twentieth-century literature.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Walser's life grew more difficult, and he spent his later years in Swiss psychiatric institutions. He stopped publishing new literary work after entering institutional care, but his reputation grew strongly after his death on December 25, 1956, and he is now regarded as a major Swiss author whose quiet, unconventional style still feels fresh.