Born: July 2, 1795 in Dresden, Saxony, Germany

Died: February 16, 1876

 Karl Gustav Nieritz, a German folk and youth writer, was considered one of the most successful German writers of popular tales during the 19th century.  Son of a Dresden teacher, Nieritz became a teacher himself and assumed the same position that his father held. When he started his career as a writer in the 1830's, he was influenced by the Catholic author Christoph von Schmid (1768-1854) (author of The Basket of Flowers, The Little Lamb, Rosa of Linden Castle and many Lamplighter titles) and can be regarded as the Protestant counterpart of this author. From about 1834 Nieritz was a writer with numerous short stories known to the people and the youth. Nieritz’s stories are about common people leading virtuous and pious lives that teach about adversity and divine intervention. The spectrum of writings mostly didactic and moral character ranges from essay to the novella. They appeared individually in calendars and other periodicals or in various combination as youth or youth Library journals and have been translated in part into several languages. Nieritz idealized in his stories, the middle class and propagated bourgeois (middle class whose concerns were the preservation and right to own private property) virtues like diligence, piety and family values. At the turn of the 20th century the work of Nieritz was criticized by members of the youth literature reform movement (Jugendschriftenbewegung) for being meaningless from a literary point of view and tendentious (having a strong tendency or bias toward a certain point of view) in its moral message. Our research here at Lamplighter has found that most of the children's books that possessed a Christ centered and biblical theological foundation were written prior to the 20th century. (Source: Wikipedia and Answers.com).