Robert Walser

Robert Walser was a German-speaking Swiss author whose works are regarded as among the most important writings of literary modernism. He is often compared to Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, and although in his lifetime he was better known than either author, his writing was largely forgotten until in the 1970s. Walser was never able to support himself as a writer and held various jobs throughout his career. He spent the last several decades of his life in a sanatorium, where he developed a microscopically tiny coded handwriting in order to write his “Microscripts”, translated and published in 2010. Several contemporary German writers, including Peter Handke, W. G. Sebald, and others, cite Walser’s influence.