Biography
Born in Switzerland in 1878, Robert Walser worked various jobs, including as a bank clerk, castle butler, and inventor’s assistant, while embarking on a remarkable literary career. From 1899 until his hospitalization in 1933 for a disputed schizophrenia diagnosis, Walser wrote up to seven novels and over a thousand short stories and prose pieces.
Although he had limited success during his lifetime, he was admired by contemporaries like Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Robert Musil, and Walter Benjamin. Today, he is recognized as a major 20th-century literary figure, with his work analyzed by W.G. Sebald, J.M. Coetzee, William Gass, and Susan Sontag. Walser described his work as segments of an ongoing, plotless novel about himself.
In his later years, he developed a paralyzing writer’s block and responded by writing in extremely small script on tiny slips of paper. After his death in 1956, these papers were discovered and preserved, though the text was so small that it was four decades before they could be deciphered.
