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Read more about
Hostovský here
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egon hostovský
Egon Hostovsky was one of the most distinctive voices in 20th-century Czech letters as well as one of the
most prolific. He was born as the youngest of eight children to a Jewish family in the
northeastern Bohemian town of Hronov in 1908 where his father was the co-owner of a small
textile factory. After finishing gymnasium in Náchod in 1927, he studied at Charles University
in Prague and then in Vienna in 1929. Throughout the 1930s he served as editor in the Prague
publishing house Melantrich. During this period he published a number of novels, among them
Lost Shadow (1931), The Black Gang (1933), The Arsonist (1935), for which
he was awarded Czechoslovakia's State Prize for Literature in 1936, and House without a Master (1937).
These were translated at the time into other European languages, notably Danish, French, Flemish, and German, and
established Hostovský as one of the leading figures of his generation of Czech writers.
In February 1939, he traveled to Brussels on a lecture tour. As a result of Nazi Germany's occupation of Czechoslovakia, he
did not return but continued to Paris and then to Lisbon before arriving in New York in February 1940, which became his
home during the war. His father, sisters and their families all perished in the death camps. He returned for a brief period
to Czechoslovakia in 1946, working in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and then in the Embassy in Norway, first as a legal
secretary and later as Charges d'Affaires. He resigned his post in 1949 and returned to the United States in February 1950, where
he taught Czech at a language school, wrote for American newspapers, and for five years served as an editor of Radio Free Europe.
He died in Montclair, New Jersey, in 1973.
Much admired by Graham Greene and Milan Kundera, Hostovský's novels written in exile, such as Seven Times the Leading Man and
The Plot, were immediately translated into English (often preceding or even without publication in Czech), which introduced his
work to an international readership.
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published by TSP:
The Arsonist
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