Sándor Márai

Born in 1900 in Kassa to an upper-middle-class family, Márai worked as a young journalist in Weimar-era Frankfurt and Berlin and then in Paris through the 1920s before returning home to become one of interwar Budapest's most prominent novelists, columnists, and diarists, keeping a private journal for most of his adult life.

Fiercely opposed to both fascism and communism, he refused to publish under the censorship the Communist regime imposed after 1948 and chose exile instead, settling first in Italy and eventually in San Diego. His books vanished from print in Hungary for decades, and he lived out his later years largely unknown to the country whose vanished bourgeois world he had spent his career elegizing.

His wife Ilona died in 1986 and their adopted son soon after; grief-stricken and in failing health, Márai shot himself in San Diego in 1989. Only after communism fell did Embers resurface in translation, turning him into an international bestseller he did not live to see.