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Joseph Roth (September 2, 1894 in Brody - May 27, 1939 in Paris) was an Austrian Jewish novelist who converted to Catholicism and is best known for his family saga The Radetzky March (1932), and for his novel of Jewish life Job (1930).
A veteran of the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War, during the 1920s Roth became a highly successful journalist in Germany, travelling widely throughout Europe as a correspondent for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung. In 1923 his first novel, The Spider's Web, was serialized in an Austrian newspaper, and he achieved moderate success as a writer through the 1920s with a series of novels documenting life in post-War Europe. It was not until the publication of Job and The Radetzky March that he achieved real acclaim as a novelist. From 1930 Roth's fiction became less concerned with contemporary society, with which he had become increasingly disillusioned, and frequently evokes, with melancholy nostalgia, life in imperial Central Europe prior to 1914. On Hitler's rise to power in 1933 Roth, as a prominent liberal Jewish journalist, was forced to leave Germany, and spent most of the next decade in Paris, a city he loved. Despite suffering from chronic alcoholism and becoming increasingly eccentric politically, Roth remained prolific until his premature death in Paris in 1939. His final novella, The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939), is amongst his finest, and chronicles the attempts made by an alcoholic vagrant to regain his dignity and honour a debt. Roth is buried in Thiais cemetery to the south of Paris.
Works
- Das Spinnennetz (The Spider's Web) (1923)
- Hotel Savoy (1924)
- Die Rebellion (The Rebellion) (1924)
- April: Die Geschichte einer Liebe () (1925)
- Der blinde Spiegel (The Blind Mirror) (1925)
- Juden auf Wanderschaft (The Wandering Jews) (1927)
- Die Flucht ohne Ende (The Flight without End) (1927)
- Zipper und sein Vater (Zipper and His Father) (1928)
- Rechts und Links (Right and Left) (1929)
- Der stumme Prophet (The Silent Prophet) (1929)
- Hiob (Job) (1930)
- Radetkymarsch (The Radetky March) (1932)
- Tarabas (1934)
- Beichte eines Mörders (Confession of a Murderer) (1936)
- Das falsche Gewicht (Weights and Measures) (1937)
- Die Kapuzinergruft (The Emperor's Tomb) (1938)
- Die Legende vom heiligen Trinker (The Legend of the Holy Drinker)(1939)
- Die Geschichte von der 1002. Nacht (The String of Pearls)
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