Theodor Fontane

Fontane trained and worked as a pharmacist for years before abandoning the trade for journalism, spending decades as a war correspondent covering the conflicts of German unification; he was briefly captured and held by French forces while reporting near the front in 1870.

He didn't turn to the novels that made his reputation until his fifties and sixties, becoming German realism's most patient, ironic chronicler of Prussian manners in old age rather than youth. Effi Briest (1894), written near the end of his life, follows a teenage bride's marriage into loneliness and ruin with a tenderness toward its heroine that sets it apart from the era's harsher adultery novels.

He died in Berlin in 1898, still working almost to the end.