His life belonged to him, only. His books belonged to the public.
B. Traven: Portrait of a Famous Unknown is a graphic biography
that tells the larger-than-life story of the German revolutionary,
actor, and writer known as B. Traven (1882?1969). Despite his commercial
success as a best-selling writer, Traven managed to keep his identity a
secret during his lifetime. It is now generally accepted that Traven
was in fact ?Ret Marut? (another psudonym), a German stage actor and
editor of an anarchist newspaper in Germany called Der Ziegelbrenner
(The Brickburner). As Marut he was a major participant in the
short-lived Bavarian Council Republic of 1919?20. Barely escaping
execution, he fled Germany and lived incognito for the remainder of his
life. His entire literary work, a great commercial success in its day,
combines lively and often humorous storytelling with radical critique of
capitalism and nationalism. His best-known work, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, from 1927, was adapted for film in 1948 by John Huston.
Golo's account of Traven's life, rendered with stunning
artwork, begins and ends with his ashes being dropped from a plane over
the Lacandon jungle in Chiapas, Mexico, just a quarter century before
the explosive uprising of the Zapatistas seemed to echo his deepest
wishes.
