Swiss · 1878–1956
Robert Walser was a Swiss German-language writer born in Biel in 1878. He left school at fourteen, worked as a bank clerk, a servant and a copyist, and lived for years in Berlin, where his brother Karl, a stage designer, helped him find publishers. There he wrote the novels The Tanners, The Assistant and Jakob von Gunten, along with hundreds of short prose pieces. After returning to Switzerland he wrote in tiny pencil script on scraps of paper, later called the microscripts. In 1929 he entered a sanatorium after a mental collapse, and in 1933 he was moved to another in Herisau, where he stopped writing. He died on a Christmas Day walk in the snow in 1956. Kafka, Musil and Hesse admired his work, and Walter Benjamin wrote about it. Translations by Christopher Middleton, Susan Bernofsky and others, and the advocacy of W.G. Sebald and Susan Sontag, brought him a large English-language readership after his death.