Bruno Schulz

Schulz taught drawing and handicrafts at a gymnasium in his hometown of Drohobycz for most of his life, publishing almost nothing until his forties, when a friend's encouragement turned his letters and sketches into The Street of Crocodiles. He followed it with a second collection, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, deepening the same hallucinatory vision of a father's transformations and a town remembered as myth.

During the German occupation a Gestapo officer who admired his draftsmanship kept him alive as a personal artist, painting murals for the officer's children, a fragile protection that ended in November 1942, when a rival officer shot Schulz in the street in an act of revenge against his protector. A novel-length manuscript known as The Messiah, entrusted to friends before his death, has never been found.