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Gottfried Keller
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gottfried Keller (July 19, 1819 – July 15, 1890) was a Swiss writer whose best known work is Green Henry.
He was born in Zürich as the son of a master turner. A love for the concrete world of reality induced him to take up painting. Keller was not without talent in this line, but achieving no signal success, he gave up painting for letters. To secure for himself a stable footing in the civic world, Keller, after a number of years spent in Germany, in 1861 assumed the office of a municipal secretary of his native city, where he died July 15, 1890.
Early in life, Keller threw aside all conventional beliefs, and his religion henceforth was a deep love of and a joyous faith in all life. Although Keller was in many respects decidedly matter-of-fact, a calm objective observer with a strong leaning toward utilitarian ideals—he had all the homely virtues of his ancestry—he nevertheless delighted in a myth-creating fancy. Keller took delight in the role of a radical free-thinking Democrat and expressed emphatic hatred against anything associated with Conservativism, participating in the Freischarenzüge against Catholic Lucerne in 1844 and 1845, although he was never involved in actual combat.
Thus Keller is very much akin to his countryman Arnold Böcklin, whom the German world honors as its greatest modern painter.
Modified after a 1920s' PD Book that is currently being proofread for Project Gutenberg: A Book of German Lyrics, ed. Friedrich Bruns.
