Robert Walser

Robert Walser was born in 1878 in Biel, Switzerland, into a large family of modest means. He left school at fourteen and drifted through a series of clerical and domestic positions, experiences that would profoundly shape his fiction. After brief periods in Stuttgart and Zurich, he moved to Berlin in 1905, where he wrote his three novels, including Jakob von Gunten, and began publishing the short prose pieces that would become his signature form. Despite early recognition from figures such as Franz Kafka, Christian Morgenstern, and Kurt Tucholsky, Walser never achieved commercial success. He returned to Switzerland in 1913 and continued writing prolifically, producing hundreds of stories, sketches, and the mysterious "microscripts" written in a tiny, nearly illegible pencil hand. In 1929, suffering from anxiety and hallucinations, he entered a sanatorium in Waldau, and in 1933 was transferred to the asylum at Herisau, where he lived for the remaining twenty-three years of his life. He was found dead in the snow on Christmas Day, 1956, during a solitary walk. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by Jakob von Gunten.