Sándor Márai

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Sándor Márai (originally Sándor Károly Henrik Grosschmied de Mára) (April 11, 1900 – February 22, 1989) was a Hungarian writer and journalist.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Sándor Márai in Budapest, Krisztinaváros 3 Works of Sándor Márai translated to English 4 External links 5 Gallery

[edit] Biography

He was born in Kassa (now named Košice in Slovakia) in Austria-Hungary to an old Saxon family. In his early years, Márai travelled and lived in different cities: Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris and briefly considered writing in German. Finally, he chose his mother language, Hungarian, to write in. He settled in Budapest, Krisztinaváros (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 wrote very enthusiastically about the Vienna Awards, but was critical of 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 in English until the mid-1990s. After his wife died, he retreated more and more into isolation. Márai committed suicide by a gunshot to his head 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 French (starting in 1992), Italian, English, German, Spanish and other languages too, and is now considered to be part of the European Twentieth Century literary canon.

[edit] Sándor Márai in Budapest, Krisztinaváros

Statue of Sándor Márai in Budapest Mikó utca, Krisztinaváros

Márai‘s memorial on his former home in Krisztinaváros

[edit] Works of Sándor Márai translated to English

• Embers (1942), Hungarian title: A gyertyák csonkig égnek
• Casanova in Bolzano (1940), Hungarian title: Vendégjáték Bolzanóban
• The Rebels - to be published in March 2007.
• Memoir of Hungary, (1971), Hungarian title: Föld, föld…!

[edit] External links

• Official Marai site at Knopf, which is releasing Marai's novels in English
• Marai's American Journal - Excerpts (in English) from Marai's final diaries,
• Sándor Márai Blog - a fan blog with news, reviews, links
• Márai at Hunlit
• Márai in Albert Tezla's Hungarian Authors
• IMDB Bio.
• Photo

[edit] Gallery

Statue of Sándor Márai in Košice

Márai‘s birth-place (today's Mäsiarska Street in Košice)

Memorial plates of Sándor Márai installed on the front of his birth-place (in Hungarian and Slovak languages)

Márai‘s signature (detail of his statue in Košice)