Biography Essay

Adalbert Stifter is the best-known nineteenth-century Austrian prose writer and is among the most highly regarded of all German and Austrian writers of the modern era. His work, along with that of such writers as Christian Dietrich Grabbe, Karl Immermann, Gottfried Keller, Wilhelm Raabe, and Theodor Storm, created the high reputation of the German novel and short story in the nineteenth century. Yet from the time of his earliest publications in the 1840s, Stifter's works have encountered a deeply divided critical response. For some critics and readers, including the great Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer and the musicians Clara and Robert Schumann, his works combine unsurpassed beauty with a unique ethical sensitivity. Others, led by the German dramatist Friedrich Hebbel, judged his writings as reactionary and boring, mannered in style, and lacking in integrity. Even during his lifetime Stifter's reputation declined steadily from an early popular and...