Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth was an Austrian novelist and journalist, born on 2 September 1894 in Brody, a town in the eastern borderlands of the Habsburg Empire. He grew up in a Jewish family and studied in Lemberg and Vienna before serving in the First World War. After the war he became a gifted newspaper reporter in Vienna, Berlin and Paris, writing vivid feuilletons about everyday life in a changing Europe.

His novels, above all those about the decline of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, mix tenderness, irony and a deep sense of loss. He was also drawn to the lives of uprooted people, soldiers returning from war, wanderers and exiles. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 he left Germany for good and lived in exile, mostly in France. Poverty, anxiety and heavy drinking marked his last years. He died in Paris on 27 May 1939. Today he is admired as one of the finest chroniclers of a vanished world.