Biography Essay

Gottfried Keller—poet, critic, and Switzerland's most prominent writer of fiction—aspired initially to be a landscape painter; it was only after his reluctant and costly determination that he lacked the talent to support himself as such that he began to produce the moderately successful poems and the great novels and novellas that have established him as one of the major figures of German "poetic realism," as the dominant style of the period from approximately 1850 to 1880 is known. Though his subject matter was wide-ranging, he consistently focused on themes of individual development, paying close attention to the role of childhood experience in the formation of character. As Heinrich Lee, the hero of Keller's autobiographical novel Der grune Heinrich (1854-1855; revised, 1879-1880; translated as Green Henry, 1960), explains: "Wenn ich nicht uberzeugt ware, daß die Kindheit schon ein Vorspiel des ganzen Lebens ist und . . . schon...