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Sándor Márai (1900-1989) was a writer and journalist from Hungary. He was born the 11th April in the city of Kassa, at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now named Košice in Slovakia.
In his early years, Márai travelled a lot, lived in different cities: Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris and briefly considered writing in German. Finally, he chose his mother tongue, Hungarian, to write in. He settled in Budapest (1928). In the 1930s, he gained prominence with a precise and clear realist style. He was the first person to write reviews of the work of Kafka. He was critical of both the fascist Horthy regime, the Nazis, and the Communist regime that seized power after World War II.
After living for some time in Italy, Márai settled in the city of San Diego, California, in the United States. He continued to write in his native language, but was not published until the end of the Cold War. After his wife died, he retreated more and more into isolation.
Márai committed suicide in San Diego in 1989.
Largely forgotten outside of Hungary, his work (consisting of poems, novels, and diaries) has only been recently "rediscovered" and republished in English and German, and is now considered to be part of the European Twentieth Century literary canon.
Works
- Embers (1942) Hungarian title: A gyertyák csonkig égnek
- The Bolzano Lover (1940) Hungarian title: Vendégjáték Bolzanóbande:Sándor Márai
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