No one knows as yet who B. Traven really was. Without revealing his identity, he became a best-selling author in the German-speaking countries of Europe with his first novel, Das Totenschiff (The Deat...
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B. Traven won instant fame in 1926 when the newly founded book club of the German Printers Union, Büchergilde Gutenberg, published Das Totenschiff: Die Geschichte eines amerikanischen Seemanns (t...
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Critical Essay by Alan Cheuse
Traven's spare but resonant narration, which harks back to the old wisdom tales of Indian-American mythology, has much in common as well with that alienated (Brec...
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Critical Essay by Michael L. Baumann
[Most] Traven scholars now agree: that Traven had been an itinerant actor and anarchist writer by the name of Ret Marut in pre-World War I Germany….
[Bo...
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Critical Essay by Michael L. Baumann
[Land des Frühlings (Land of Spring)] is a Traven source book: here we find, in the form of theory, argument, and statements of fact, Traven's princ...
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Critical Essay by John M. Reilly
The narrator's repudiation of the popular formula for success, which he repeats at length throughout [The Death Ship], links his tale with the specific demysti...
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B. Traven
Critical Essay by Alan Cheuse
