Günter Grass has achieved a very rare thing in contemporary arts and letters, earning both critical respect and commercial success in every genre and artistic medium he has taken up.
It and his subsequent works-the novella Cat and Mouse (1961) and the novel Dog Years (1963)-are popularly known as the Danzig trilogy. His many other books include From the Diary of a Snail (1972), The Flounder (1977). The Meeting at Telgte (1979), Headbirths, or The Germans are Dying Out (1980), The Rat (1986), and Show Your Tongue (1989).
From 1955 to 1967, he participated in the meetings of Group 47, an informal but influential association of German writers and critics, so called because it first met in September of 1947. Its members, including Heinrich Böll, Uwe Johnson, Ilse Aichinger, and Grass, were organized around their common mission to develop and use a literary language that stood in radical opposition to the complex and ornate prose style characteristic of Nazi-era propaganda.