The Leviathan

About the Author and the Translator

Joseph Roth

“The totality of Joseph Roth’s work is no less than a tragedie humaine achieved in the techniques of modern fiction.”

— Nadine Gordimer

“There may be no modern writer more able to combine the novelistic and the poetic, to blend lusty, undamaged realism with sparkling powers of metaphor and simile.” — James Wood

“Roth’s gifts are substantial, and of a kind rarer now than it was fifty years ago.” — The New Yorker

Joseph Roth (1894–1939) was an Austrian journalist and novelist. Born in East Galicia, Roth studied in Vienna before leaving school to fight in the First World War. After the defeat and collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Roth moved to Berlin, where he worked as a journalist. A moderate success as a novelist early on, he gained wide acclaim in 1932 with the publication of The Radetzky March, a look at life under the collapsing Empire. The rise of Hitler filled Roth with despair; sensing “great catastrophe,” he committed suicide in 1939.

Michael Hofmann is an award-winning poet and the translator of such acclaimed authors as Franz Kafka, Ernst Jünger, Joseph Roth, and Thomas Bernhard. He currently teaches at the University of Florida.