# Künstlerroman

A Künstlerroman (German pronunciation:; plural -ane), meaning "artist's novel" in English, is a narrative about an artist's growth to maturity. It could be classified as a sub-category of Bildungsroman: a coming-of-age novel. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, one way a Künstlerroman may differ from a Bildungsroman is its ending, where a Künstlerroman hero rejects the everyday life, but a Bildungsroman hero settles for being an ordinary citizen. According to Oxford Reference, the difference may lie in a longer view across the Künstlerroman hero's whole life, not just their childhood years.

## Examples by language
### German

* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1795 Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
* Ludwig Tieck's 1798 Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen
* Novalis's 1802 Heinrich von Ofterdingen
* Hermann Hesse's Demian (1919) and Klingsor's Last Summer (1920)
* Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger (1903), and Doctor Faustus (1947)
* Jakob Wassermann's 1915 Das Gänsemännchen
* Rainer Maria Rilke's 1910 The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
* Eduard Mörike's 1856 Mozart on the way to Prague

### English

* 1805 William Wordsworth's The Prelude
* 1833–34 Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus
* 1847 Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre
* 1848 Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
* 1850 Charles Dickens' David Copperfield
* 1852 Herman Melville's Pierre: or, The Ambiguities
* 1856 Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh
* 1875 Henry James's Roderick Hudson
* 1890 Henry James's The Tragic Muse
* 1901 Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career
* 1903 Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh
* 1908 Henry Handel Richardson's Maurice Guest
* 1909 Jack London's Martin Eden
* 1913 D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers
* 1915 W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage
* 1915 Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark
* 1916 James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
* 1918 Wyndham Lewis's Tarr
* 1920 F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise
* 1928 Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness
* 1929 Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel
* 1933 Malcolm Lowry's Ultramarine
* 1936 George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying
* 1939 John Fante's Ask the Dust
* 1943 Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
* 1945 Richard Wright's Black Boy
* 1946 Philip Larkin's Jill
* 1947 W.O. Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind
* 1952 Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt
* 1952 Ernest Buckler's The Mountain and the Valley
* 1955 William Gaddis's The Recognitions
* 1961 Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy
* 1963 Leonard Cohen's The Favourite Game
* 1970 Patrick White's The Vivisector
* 1971 Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women
* 1972 Chaim Potok's My Name Is Asher Lev
* 1973 Milan Kundera's Life Is Elsewhere
* 1974 Margaret Laurence's The Diviners
* 1978 John Irving's The World According to Garp
* 1981 Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books
* 1982 Charles Bukowski's Ham on Rye
* 1983 Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street
* 1985 Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
* 1988 Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye
* 1999 Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring
* 2003 Jennifer Donnelly's A Northern Light
* 2006 Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
* 2006 Stew's Passing Strange
* 2010 Patti Smith's Just Kids
* 2010 Eileen Myles's Inferno (A Poet's Novel)
* 2010 Wena Poon's Alex y Robert
* 2011 Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station
* 2019 Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
* 2020 Andrew Unger's Once Removed
* 2022 Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Notes
* A semiautobiographical narrative takes up two of the four books of Gray's Lanark.
* In John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy, the Camera Eye sections add up to a modernist autobiographical Künstlerroman.
* John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse is a collection of short stories that are often read as a postmodernist Künstlerroman.

### French

* 1831, 1837 Honoré de Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece
* 1904–1905 Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe
* 1913–1927 Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time

### Italian

* Gabriele D'Annunzio's Il Piacere, Le Vergini Delle Rocce and Il Fuoco
* 1975 Gavino Ledda's My Father, My Master (Padre Padrone)
* 2012–2015 Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels

### Icelandic

* Halldór Laxness's World Light
* Halldór Laxness's The Fish Can Sing

### Russian

* Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift
* Leo Tolstoy's trilogy of novellas Childhood, Boyhood, &Youth

### Croatian

* 1932 Miroslav Krleža's The Return of Filip Latinovicz

### Malayalam

* 1993 Perumbadavam Sreedharan's Oru Sankeerthanam Pole

### Norwegian

* 2009–2011 Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle (Knausgård novels)
* 1890 Knut Hamsun's Hunger (“Sult”)

### Portuguese

* 1883 Maria Benedita Bormann's Lésbia
* 1976 Ferreira Gullar's Poema Sujo

### Turkish

* 1896–1897 Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil's Blue and Black (Mavi ve Siyah)
* 1972 Oğuz Atay’s Tutunamayanlar
* 1959 Yusuf Atılgan’s Aylak adam

### Bengali

* 1917-1933 Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's Srikanta
* 1999 Malay Roy Choudhury's Chhotoloker Chhotobela