Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868) was born in the rural Bohemian market town of Oberplan, then part of the Austrian Empire but today in the Czech Republic. After a difficult childhood and failure to procure a law degree, Stifter supported himself as a tutor to the children of aristocrats. He published his first story in 1840, the success of which started him on a career as a writer and newspaper editor. His works include numerous stories and novellas, as well as Witiko, a historical novel, and Indian Summer, considered one of the finest examples of the German bildungsroman. Isabel Fargo Cole is a writer and a translator of such authors as Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Franz F hmann, Wolfgang Hilbig, and Klaus Hoffer. She lives in Berlin, Germany.
The work of Adalbert Stifter, who was one of the very few great novelists in German literature, can be compared to no other writer of the nineteenth century in pure happiness, wisdom, and beauty. . . . Stifter became the greatest landscape-painter in literature . . . someone who possesses the magic wand to transform all visible things into words and all visible movements-into sentences. -Hannah Arendt