greatest landscape writer

 Adalbert Stifter (German: [ˈʃtɪftɐ]; 23 October 1805 – 28 January 1868) was a Bohemian-Austrian writer, poet, painter, and pedagogue. He was notable for the vivid natural landscapes depicted in his writing and has long been popular in the German-speaking world.

Stifter's work is characterized by the pursuit of beauty; his characters strive to be moral and move in gorgeous landscapes luxuriously described. Evil, cruelty, and suffering rarely appear on the surface of his writing, but Thomas Mann noted that "behind the quiet, inward exactitude of his descriptions of Nature in particular there is at work a predilection for the excessive, the elemental, and the catastrophic, the pathological." Although considered by some to be one-dimensional compared to his more famous and realistic contemporaries, his visions of ideal worlds reflect his informal allegiance to the Biedermeier movement in literature. As Carl Schorske puts it, "To illustrate and propagate his concept of Bildung, compounded of Benedictine world piety, German humanism, and Biedermeier conventionality, Stifter gave to the world his novel Der Nachsommer".

In Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, the main character Harry Haller wonders "whether it isn't time to follow the example of Adalbert Stifter and have an accident while shaving". Thomas Mann was also an admirer of Stifter, calling him "one of the most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world literature."In the satirical novel Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard, the main character Reger gives a vitriolic rant disparaging Stifter's fiction. 

Rilke^[9] and Hugo von Hofmannsthal^[10] were deeply indebted to his art.^[

^-----

^{The "Slow Homecoming": Handke's later, epic novels (such as My Year in the No-Man's Bay or Crossing the Sierra de Gredos) lean toward poetic, spatial, and phenomenological wanderings rather than the enclosed, debate-driven, and disease-ridden intellectualism of Mann's Swiss sanatorium.}