The Serapion Brethren
by E T A Hoffman
His style was so unusual that it had a profound influence on a lot of writers in the 19th and 20th centuries. I would say he was the founder of magic realism. I think he also paved the ground for existentialism because he believed there was no God, and he proposed that we are all artists of our own lives and that many of the stories to do with God are fairy tales.
