Profile of B. Traven on Famous Like Me

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Books

• The Death Ship: the Story of an American Sailor (First English pub. 1934) ISBN 1556521103
• Treasure of the Sierra Madre (First English pub. 1935) ISBN 0809001608
• The Wobbly
• The Cotton Pickers ISBN 1566630754
• The Night Visitor and Other Stories ISBN 1566630398
• The Bridge in the Jungle (First English pub. 1938) ISBN 1566630630

Jungle Novels

• Government ISBN 156663038x
• The Carreta ISBN 1566630452
• March to the Monteria ISBN 1566630460
• Trozas ISBN 1566632196
• The Rebellion of the Hanged (First English pub. 1952)ISBN 1566630649
• The General from the Jungle ISBN 1566630762

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