Egon Hostovský

Egon Hostovský (April 23, 1908, Hronov – May 7, 1973, Montclair), was a Czech writer.

He studied at the gymnasium in Náchod in 1927, then philosophy in Prague and at university in Vienna in 1929, but did not graduate.

He returned to Prague in 1930 and worked as an editor in several publishing houses.

In 1937 Hostovský joined the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in 1939 he was posted to Brussels, from where, after the occupation of Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939, he emigrated to Paris. After Paris was occupied in 1940, he fled to Portugal and then, in 1941, travelled to the United States of America, where he worked in New York at the Czechoslovakian consulate.

After World War II he returned to Czechoslovakia and again worked at the Foreign Ministry, but in 1948 he travelled to Denmark, and then to Norway and finally to the United States, where he worked as a Czech language teacher and later as a journalist and editor at Radio Free Europe. Several of his novels, including The Midnight Patient and Three Nights, were translated in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Philip Hillyer Smith, Jr., a scholar of linguistics and the Czech language.

After Hostovsky's death, a literary prize -- the Egon Hostovsky Prize -- was founded in his name by his wife.

Works

His work is influenced by his Jewish origin and exile. His literary heroes fight (inner) evil, due to political situation are forced to leave their country and search for lost certainties and roots.

Before his first emigration his work was influenced by expressionism.

• Zavřené dveře – 1926
• Stezka podél cesty – 1928, psychological novel
• Gheto v nich – 1928
• Danajský dar – 1930
• Případ profesora Kornera – 1932
• Černá tlupa – 1933
• Žhář – 1935
• Listy z vyhnanství – 1941
• Sedmkrát v hlavní úloze – 1942, a novel
• Úkryt – 1943
• Cizinec hledá byt – 1947
• Nezvěstný – 1951
• Půlnoční pacient (The Midnight Patient) – 1954
• Dobročinný večírek – 1957
• Všeobecné spiknutí – 1961 partly autobiographical
• Literární dobrodružství českého spisovatele v cizině – 1966
• Tři noci – 1964
• Epidemie – 1972
• Osvoboditel se vrací – 1972, drama

Links

• short biography from the NY Times [1]