Georg Büchner
Büchner is more a hero to me than a good writer. He is the quintessential literary visionary: the perfect artist who literally dies at the height of his creative production. He was a political radical who elevated the economic and social plight of the poor around him to high art, which few appreciated at the time. He gave the poor and the disposed a dignity they never had in literature before his time.
Woyzeck is his masterpiece. He managed to write five plays and novellas by the time of his death at 23 from typhus. Had he lived, he certainly would have become the literary giant the likes of Goethe or Schiller in Germany. Like them both, he had the grand sense of man's destiny clearly in mind. But unlike them, he tended to focus more on the feelings of loss that accompany such great acts found in revolution and liberation.