This is the ninth essay by Hillel Halkin in his series on seminal Hebrew writers of the 19th and early-20th centuries. The preceding eight essays have dealt with the novelists Joseph Perl, Avraham Mapu, Peretz Smolenskin, and Yosef Ḥayyim Brenner, the poets Yehudah Leib Gordon and Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik, the essayists and Zionist thinkers Ahad Ha’am and A.D. Gordon, and the writer, journalist, and intellectual Micha Yosef Berdichevsky.