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...
Read more
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...
Read more
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 (Brech...
Read more
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….
[Both] ...
Read more
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 princi...
Read more
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 demystif...
Read more