Gottfried Keller

Keller's father, a woodturner, died when he was five, leaving the family poor; he was expelled from Zurich's industrial school as a teenager and set off for Munich to train as a landscape painter, a career that petered out within a few frustrating years. He turned to writing in his late twenties, publishing poems and the first version of Green Henry, a barely disguised account of his own failed vocation.

Success came slowly: he revised Green Henry decades later into its more assured final form, and built a parallel reputation with the linked town tales of Seldwyla, sharp comic studies of provincial vanity and virtue. Between books he spent fifteen years as Zurich canton's state secretary, a senior civil-service post he filled with the same unhurried thoroughness he brought to prose. He never married, and died in his native city in 1890, a legend of Swiss letters.