a German novelist and poet, regarded by many as the most important 19th-century German-language realist writer. At the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to an apothecary, his father's profession. He became an apothecary himself, and in 1839, at the age of 20, wrote his first work (Heinrichs IV. erste Liebe, now lost). His further education was in Leipzig where he came into contact with the progressives of the Vormärz. Fontane's first published work, the novella Geschwisterliebe (Sibling Love), appeared in the Berlin Figaro in December 1839.
