Theodor Fontane (30 December 1819 – 20 September 1898) was a German novelist and poet, regarded by many to be the most important 19th-century German-language realist writer.

At the ripe age of 57 Fontane finally took to what he would be remembered for, the novel. His fine historical romance Vor dem Sturm (1878) was followed by a series of novels of modern life, notably L'Adultera (1882), a book about adultery which was considered so risqué that it took Fontane two years to find a publisher.

In his novels Frau Jenny Treibel, Irrungen, Wirrungen, and Effi Briest (1894), he found his very own tone, yielding insights into the lives of the nobility as well as the "common man"; his achievement there was later described as poetic realism. In Der Stechlin (1899), his last finished novel, Fontane adapted the realistic methods and social criticism of contemporary French fiction to the conditions of Prussian life. - from Wikipedia