Job

Joseph Roth (1894-1939) is one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century, and one of the essential figures of Central European literature. Austrian writer and journalist of Jewish origin, he was born in the city of Brody, in Eastern Galicia, present-day Ukraine. He fought in World War I for the Austro-Hungarian army from 1916 to 1918, having been taken prisoner by the Russian army. The experience of the war marked him deeply and would inspire many of his books. After the war, he worked as a journalist in Vienna and Berlin, and in 1923 he began his collaboration with the Frankfurter Zeitung, which took him to travel throughout Europe. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, and anticipating the catastrophe that was approaching, he went into exile in Paris, where, weakened by alcoholism, he would eventually die of pneumonia on May 27, 1939, months before the outbreak of World War II.