Erich Maria Remarque

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke , better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian–Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language. His haunting images focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief,... solitude, and profound anxiety: themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets. He wrote in both verse and a highly lyrical prose. Among English-language readers, his best-known work is the Duino Elegies; his two most famous prose works are the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. He also wrote more than 400 poems in French, dedicated to his homeland of choice, the canton of Valais in Switzerland. He was born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke in Prague, capital of Bohemia . His childhood and youth in Prague were not especially happy. His father, Josef Rilke , became a railway official after an unsuccessful military career.
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Karl Friedrich May was a popular German writer, noted mainly for adventure novels set in the American Old West, and similar books set in the Orient and Middle East . In addition, he wrote stories set in his native Germany, in China and in South America. May also has written poetry and a play, and... composed music; he also was proficient player of several musical instruments. Many of his works were filmed, adapted for the stage, turned into audio dramas or into comics. A highly imaginative and fanciful writer, May never visited the exotic places featured in his stories until late in life, when the clash between fiction and reality led to a complete change in his work. Asteroid 348 May is named in his honor. Karl May was born into a family of poor weavers in Ernstthal, Schönburgische Rezessherrschaften . He was the fifth child out of fourteen, nine of whom died within a few months of their birth.
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Henri Barbusse was a French novelist and a member of the French Communist Party. The son of a French father and an English mother, Barbusse was born in Asnières-sur-Seine, France in 1873. Although he grew up in a small town, he left for Paris in 1889 at age 16. In 1914, at the age of 41, he... enlisted in the French Army and served against Germany in World War I. Invalided out of the army three times, Barbusse would serve in the war for 17 months, until the end of 1915, when he was permanently moved into a clerical position due to pulmonary damage, exhaustion, and dysentery. Barbusse first came to fame with the publication of his novel Le Feu in 1916, which was based on his experiences during World War I. By this time, Barbusse had become a pacifist, and his writing demonstrated his growing hatred of militarism. Le Feu drew criticism at the time for its harsh naturalism, but won the Prix Goncourt. In January, 1918 he left France and moved to the city of Moscow, Russia where he married a Russian woman and joined the Bolshevik Party.
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