Bruno Schulz (July 12, 1892)

From a review of a biography in the New York Times:

"Anyone who has read the stories of Bruno Schulz, the collection called 'The Street of Crocodiles,' or 'Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,' will know this writer as one of the strangest literary figures of the century. The stories are weirdly beautiful, evocations of a world where, as Jerzy Ficowski puts it in this biography of Schulz, a 'general fluctuation of the laws of nature' operates, where time itself loses its inevitability and even death can be undone. When Schulz was gunned down by the Gestapo in 1942 in Drohobycz, the Polish town (now part of Ukraine) where he spent his entire life, literature lost a voice as unusual in its way as Kafka's."

I have read "The Street of Crocodiles," and I'm not sure I am as enthusiastic as this reviewer, but I am highly aware of the great regard in which Schultz is held by others.