Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth

Brody, 1894 - Paris, 1939, Austrian novelist and journalist, his real name was Moses Joseph Roth. He studied literature and philosophy at the universities of Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine) and Vienna. Then worked as a journalist in Vienna and Berlin, where he went after the Nazi rise to power in 1933 because of his Jewish ancestry (although he was Catholic because of his loyalty to the Austro-Hungarian royal house). It was at that time a popular author thanks to the publication of his novels Job (1930) and The Radetzky march (1932). Austria also abandoned after realizing that the Austrian Nazis sooner than later they would take power, exiling alternatively several European cities until arriving mainly in Paris.

In France he eventually fell into alcoholism, eventually dying in 1939, just months before the start of World War II. He is considered one of the best exponents of the Central prose of the twentieth century.