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“The creative person should have no
other biography than his works.”
“Ordinary people can never fall over
the walls, because they never dare climb high enough to see what is beyond the
walls.”
“I wonder what goes on night and day
beneath the surface of a cemetery.”
― B. Traven, The Death Ship
B. Traven was the pen name of
a presumably German novelist, whose real name, nationality, date and
place of birth and details of biography are all subject to dispute. One of the
few certainties about Traven's life is that he lived for years in Mexico,
where the majority of his fiction is also set—including The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1927),
which was adapted for the Academy Award winning film of the same name in
1948.
Virtually every detail of Traven's life has been disputed and hotly
debated. There were many hypotheses on the true identity of B. Traven, some of
them wildly fantastic. Most agree that Traven was Ret Marut, a German
stage actor and anarchist, who supposedly left Europe for
Mexico around 1924. There are many good reasons (see below) to believe that
Marut/Traven's real name was Otto Feige and that he was born in Schwiebus in Brandenburg, modern day Świebodzin in
Poland.
B. Traven is the author of twelve novels, one book of reportage and
several short stories, in which the sensational and adventure subjects combine
with a critical attitude towards capitalism,
reflecting the socialist and anarchist sympathies
of the writer. B. Traven's best known works include the novels The Death
Ship from 1926,The Treasure of the Sierra Madre from 1927
(filmed in 1948 by John Huston), and the so-called "Jungle
Novels," also known as the Caoba cyclus (from the Spanish
word caoba, meaning mahogany).
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