B. Traven
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
B. Traven (dates unknown, possibly 1890-1969) was the nom de plume of an enigmatic twentieth century novelist whose most famous work is the novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, filmed by John Huston in 1948. The name B. Traven appeared as author of many other novels, including 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. His writing portrays a bleak and violent world and is notable for anti-capitalist and pro-anarchist sympathies.
While his identity has been the subject of much speculation, the current consensus is that the writer who used the name B. Traven was a man known for different periods of his life as Ret Marut (1907-1924), Traven Torsvan (1925-1951) and Hal Croves (1952-1969). No one theory of his origins has, however, received universal acceptance; one theory is that he was born in Chicago in 1890, name unknown. Another is that he was born in 1882 a member of the German working-class called Herman Albert Otto Maximilian Feige, this being a name given by Ret Marut in 1923 which has been confirmed as that of a real individual whose biography fits with the known facts of B. Traven's life.
