ABSTRACT
It is regrettable that the Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) remains so scarcely known in the United States at a time when his arresting novels and short prose pieces are considered, not only in German-language countries but throughout continental Europe, to constitute a major oeuvre. For most American readers, the author of Jakob von Gunten (1908) and The Robber (written in 1925, published in 1972)—if he is acknowledged at all—is obscured by the long shadows cast by contemporaries who, in recent decades, have become more renowned: Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil. Yet in his day, Walser’s work was admired by these and other pioneering modernists. Tellingly, when Musil reviewed Kafka’s first collection of stories, he observed that the Prague author was “a special case of the Walser type.”
