Paul Heyse

Heyse was the son of a Berlin classics professor, publishing precocious verse before Maximilian II of Bavaria summoned him to Munich in 1854 on a lifetime stipend to ornament the court's circle of poets. He repaid it with nearly sixty years of novellas (some hundred and eighty of them) plus plays, novels, and translations of the Italian poets he loved.

From Boccaccio's tale of a nobleman who serves his beloved his own hunting falcon, Heyse drew his 'falcon theory': every novella needs one singular, unforgettable image at its center. L'Arrabbiata (1855), written at twenty-five, remains the exemplar he never bettered.

The Nobel committee honored his 'consummate artistry, permeated with idealism' in 1910, by which time the naturalists had filed him under belle-époque china. He died in Munich in 1914, weeks before the world of his fiction did.