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 Death Ship) in 1926. Although he always claimed to be an...

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 (translated as The Death Ship, 1934). It was a story...

The novel 'Das Totenschiff' was published under the pseudonym B. Traven in 1926 and the true identity of the author was long one of the mysteries of German literature. Following his death in 1969, his widow confirmed that Ret Marut was B. Traven. The...

B Traven siempre fue celoso de su intimidad, para él la obra estaba por encima de la vida del autor. En la sociedad moderna --indicaba-- todo se transforma en mercancía para ser consumida y los escritores son acosados para que vendan sus declaraciones,...

[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…. [Both] circumstantial and internal, or textual, evidence seems to confirm the identity of the two men: Ret Marut disappeared from Germany in the early 1920s (he probably left Europe in 1922 and landed in Mexico toward the end of that year); B. Traven's stories began to appear in German magazines early in 1925, their manuscripts having been sent to...

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 demystification of many novels that are anti-bourgeois and symptomatic of the authors' estrangement from prevailing cultural ideals. On the other hand the efforts to set us straight about the real work of sailors leads to the radical core of this story of the proletarian at sea. Presenting himself as homeless and stateless the narrator, thus, r...

[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 principal ideas, as well as material similar to that which went into his novels and stories. Here we find Traven's fierce indignation, his anger at the inequities of a world he did not make, and his intense involvement in the fate of the underdog. Here we meet Traven the idealist and impatient philosophical anarchist, the observer of nature, the ...