BORN IN GMÜND, AUSTRIA, IN 1944, Gernot Wolfgruber, after attending school, worked at various trades as an apprentice and laborer, and later as a computer programmer. After earning his Matura he then studied journalism and political science. He now lives in Vienna as a freelance writer. To date he has completed five novels: Auf freiem Fuß (1975), Herrenjahre (1976), Niemandsland (1978), Verlauf eines Sommers (1981), and Die Nähe der Sonne (1985), as well as his television screenplay Der Jagdgast (1978), all with the Austrian Residenz Verlag.

Wolfgruber's first three novels are set among factory and office workers in an Austrian small-town milieu. In all three, the male protagonist struggles doggedly and, in the end, vainly, to escape the unalleviated bleakness of his day-to-day existence at the factory, in his parents’ home, the provincial town, and, in Herrenjahre and Niemandsland, a marriage grown sour. The avenues of flight are as futile as they are limited: compulsive cigarette breaks in the factory latrine, hopes of social advancement, alcohol, and sex. Although in these novels Wolfgruber depicts the work environment consistently and with unerring realism, he was from the start not an ideological author, and his theme transcends the economically determined problems of proletarian existence. Rather, he draws on a world that he himself knows intimately in order to shape the focus of the individual's quest for meaning and freedom — or, plainly put, happiness amid the alienation that characterizes modern society.

The question raised by some critics after Niemandsland of whether the author would now move creatively beyond the proletarian and lower-middle class setting that typified his earlier work was answered in his next novel, Verlauf eines Sommers. Martin Lenau, its protagonist, belongs to the middle class. After working at a bank, he makes an unsuccessful try at medical studies (supported by his wife's income as a teacher), and finally resigns himself to a lackluster job as a sales agent for a dental supply company. The motifs with which Wolfgruber portrays Lenau's attempts to escape from the dreariness of his work and marriage are familiar from the earlier novels: empty camaraderie, drinking to the point of numbness, and sexual flings. But he employs these motifs with such precision of language and remarkable richness of detail that one never feels he is citing himself. Just as little are they an end in themselves.