While awaiting for the centenary of the foundation of the state of Latvia, it is important to honour those personalities who have cultivated the Latvian language and literature, prepared teachers who would in their own career continue the work of their predecessors. Kārlis Kārkliņš who was born in 1888 in the township of Kauguri near Valmiera is one of these. As a son of a Latvian farm servant K. Kārkliņš had to mount up the ladder to get a decent education: After having finished the teacher’s seminar in Valmiera (1910) he worked until 1920 as a teacher at two commerce schools in Valmiera. Then he moved to Riga where he worked as a teacher but at the same time he began to study Latvian philology at the University of Latvia. Within 6 years he finished his study which was not easy as he was working as a teacher at the 3rd Middle-School and during his last semesters at the 2nd Middle-School and at the Teachers Seminary in Riga. While he was studying he wrote the book: Fundamental course in Literature for primary-schools (1921) which has been worked over and re-edited several times. K. Kārkliņš dedicated his life to the sciences of literature and education and about these subjects he wrote and published some important publications. There are textbooks for the Latvian language to be used in primary schools in the 20th and 30th of the 20th century as well as research about the Latvian writers and poets Rūdolfs Blaumanis, Fricis Bārda (researched together with K. Kraujiņš), about Atis Kronvalds (together with A. Goba), and articles about Anna Brigadere, Apsīšu Jēkabs and others. While he worked at the University of Latvia (1930-1944), K. Kārkliņš defended his doctoral dissertation about the writer R. Blaumanis (1940). K. Kārkliņš became professor at the University of Latvia (1943), but at the end of the Second World War he emigrated and worked for some years at the Baltic University in Pinneberg, Germany. There he wrote his books about the ''History of the Latvian literature'' and a textbook for foreign literature, he wrote several poems too. His final years he passed in the United States but because of his sickness he could not realise much of his plans.