Carl Spitteler

Carl Friedrich Georg Spitteler was born on 24 April 1845 in Switzerland, and spent decades writing verse that swung between the pessimistic and the heroic. His major work, *Olympian Spring*, was an epic ambitious enough to catch the Nobel committee's eye in 1919, when they awarded him the prize "in special appreciation" of that single text. The honor arrived late in his life. He died on 29 December 1924, five years after the prize, leaving behind poems that mapped both despair and grandeur — and a reputation that never quite escaped the gravitational pull of that one citation.