Künstlerroman

A Künstlerroman (plural -ane), meaning "artist's novel" in English, is a narrative about an artist's growth to maturity. It could be classified as a sub-category of Bildungsroman: a coming-of-age novel. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, one way a Künstlerroman may differ from a Bildungsroman is its ending, where a Künstlerroman hero rejects the everyday life, but a Bildungsroman hero settles for being an ordinary citizen. According to Oxford Reference, the difference may lie in a longer view across the Künstlerroman hero's whole life, not just their childhood years.

German

 * Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1795 Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
 * Ludwig Tieck's 1798 Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen
 * Novalis's 1802 Heinrich von Ofterdingen
 * Hermann Hesse's Demian (1919) and Klingsor's Last Summer (1920)
 * Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger (1903), and Doctor Faustus (1947)
 * Jakob Wassermann's 1915 Das Gänsemännchen
 * Rainer Maria Rilke's 1910 The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
 * Eduard Mörike's 1856 Mozart on the way to Prague

English

 * 1805 William Wordsworth's The Prelude
 * 1833–34 Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus
 * 1847 Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre
 * 1848 Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
 * 1850 Charles Dickens' David Copperfield
 * 1852 Herman Melville's Pierre: or, The Ambiguities
 * 1856 Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh
 * 1875 Henry James's Roderick Hudson
 * 1890 Henry James's The Tragic Muse
 * 1901 Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career
 * 1903 Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh
 * 1908 Henry Handel Richardson's Maurice Guest
 * 1909 Jack London's Martin Eden
 * 1913 D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers
 * 1915 W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage
 * 1915 Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark
 * 1916 James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
 * 1918 Wyndham Lewis's Tarr
 * 1920 F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise
 * 1928 Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness
 * 1929 Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel
 * 1933 Malcolm Lowry's Ultramarine
 * 1936 George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying
 * 1939 John Fante's Ask the Dust
 * 1943 Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
 * 1945 Richard Wright's Black Boy
 * 1946 Philip Larkin's Jill
 * 1947 W.O. Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind
 * 1952 Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt
 * 1952 Ernest Buckler's The Mountain and the Valley
 * 1955 William Gaddis's The Recognitions
 * 1961 Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy
 * 1963 Leonard Cohen's The Favourite Game
 * 1970 Patrick White's The Vivisector
 * 1971 Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women
 * 1972 Chaim Potok's My Name Is Asher Lev
 * 1973 Milan Kundera's Life Is Elsewhere
 * 1974 Margaret Laurence's The Diviners
 * 1978 John Irving's The World According to Garp
 * 1981 Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books
 * 1982 Charles Bukowski's Ham on Rye
 * 1985 Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
 * 1988 Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye
 * 1999 Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring
 * 2003 Jennifer Donnelly's A Northern Light
 * 2006 Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
 * 2006 Stew's Passing Strange
 * 2010 Patti Smith's Just Kids
 * 2010 Eileen Myles's Inferno (A Poet's Novel)
 * 2010 Wena Poon's Alex y Robert
 * 2011 Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station
 * 2019 Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
 * 2020 Andrew Unger's Once Removed
 * 2022 Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Notes
 * A semiautobiographical narrative takes up two of the four books of Gray's Lanark.
 * In John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy, the Camera Eye sections add up to a modernist autobiographical Künstlerroman.
 * John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse is a collection of short stories that are often read as a postmodernist Künstlerroman.

French

 * 1831, 1837 Honoré de Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece
 * 1904–1905 Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe
 * 1913–1927 Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time

Italian

 * Gabriele D'Annunzio's Il Piacere, Le Vergini Delle Rocce and Il Fuoco
 * 1975 Gavino Ledda's My Father, My Master (Padre Padrone)
 * 2012–2015 Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels

Icelandic

 * Halldór Laxness's World Light
 * Halldór Laxness's The Fish Can Sing

Russian

 * Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift
 * Leo Tolstoy's trilogy of novellas Childhood, Boyhood, &Youth

Croatian

 * 1932 Miroslav Krleža's The Return of Filip Latinovicz

Malayalam

 * 1993 Perumbadavam Sreedharan's Oru Sankeerthanam Pole

Norwegian

 * 2009–2011 Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle (Knausgård novels)
 * 1890 Knut Hamsun's Hunger (“Sult”)

Portuguese

 * 1883 Maria Benedita Bormann's Lésbia
 * 1976 Ferreira Gullar's Poema Sujo

Turkish

 * 1896–1897 Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil's Blue and Black (Mavi ve Siyah)
 * 1972 Oğuz Atay’s Tutunamayanlar
 * 1959 Yusuf Atılgan’s Aylak adam

Bengali

 * 1917-1933 Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's Srikanta
 * 1999 Malay Roy Choudhury's Chhotoloker Chhotobela