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 American, no documentary proof of his American origin exists, and his books were written in German for German publishers years before some of them were either formally translated from the German by British translators or submitted by Traven for publication in the United States in a curiously Germanic English that had to be revised by American editors. Traven's American readers have nevertheless taken him for an American because the flavor of his fiction has always appeared to them to be authentically American.

It is possible to divide the works he wrote under the name B. Traven into three periods: 1) from 1926 to 1929, the most prolific period, during...