Gerhart Hauptmann

Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann was born on 15 November 1862 in Germany, into a century that wanted its art to look like life. He became a dramatist and novelist who championed literary naturalism—the unvarnished, the working-class, the raw—and his plays made him one of the movement's most important voices in German letters. He didn't stay locked in one style; he folded other modes into his work as his career stretched on. The Nobel Prize in Literature came to him in 1912. He died on 6 June 1946.