B. Traven

B. Traven (d. March 26, 1969) was an enigmatic novelist who wrote in German, and who is most famous in North America for having written the novel that was the basis for the Humphrey Bogart movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. His other novels were ignored for many years in North America, while his work was being acclaimed internationally and translated into numerous languages.

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Traven wrote numerous other novels, which include The Death Ship and the epic Jungle Novel series, which is a description of Government corruption, and an Indian uprising set at the birth of the Mexican revolution. The Jungle novels include Government, The Carreta, March to the Monteria, Trozas, The Rebellion of the Hanged, and The General from the Jungle and powerfully portray the human basis of the Mexican revolution. As of 2005, some works are still awaiting translation from German to English.

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Until recently, little was known about the man himself; it was not even clear whether he was German or merely wrote in the language. It is clear from the descriptions in his novels that he must have at least travelled extensively (if not lived) in Europe, the United States and Mexico.

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On the basis of comparing writing styles, it has been suggested that Traven was a pseudonym for the German anarchist Ret Marut, who published an underground magazine in the last years of the Weimar Republic. Another identity for Traven may have been "Traven's agent", the seemingly English Hal Croves who met with director John Huston during the filming of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

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Traven's widow, Rosa Elena Luj?n, supported both of these speculations in an interview published in 1990 in The New York Times.

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Traven, like the American authors Thomas Pynchon and JD Salinger, delighted in his personal anonymity. The Times reporter notes that the irrelevance of formal identity is a central theme of The Death Ship. Traven's widow said that Traven had something like ten identities and "loved to tangle things up." The story notes that the identity of "Ret Marut" can be traced back to 1907, and that neither Traven's widow nor anyone else really knows who he was before that.

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March 26: March 26 is the 85th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (86th in leap years). There are 280 days remaining....

1969: 1969 was a common year starting on Wednesday...

Novel: A novel (from French nouvelle, "new") is an extended fictional narrative in prose. Down into the 18th century, the word referred specifically to short fictions of love and intrigue as opposed to romances—epic-length works about love and adventures. Having become one of the major literary genr...