Before Gunter Grass achieved worldwide fame as a novelist, the future author of The Tin Drum studied sculpture at the art academies of Dusseldorf and Berlin. Over the past 60 years of artistic life, he has created not only novels, poems, stories and plays, but an extensive body of artworks in a diverse array of media. His writings are inconceivable without their visual counterpart for reasons both private and public. As a matter of method, during the slow, intimate process of painting, drawing and modeling, Grass develops the ideas for new novels. After he has finished a book, he moves back to his studio and his drawing table. As a matter of aesthetics, he created the dust jacket illustrations for each of his first editions, which has lent his literary works a distinctive unified style.