Erich Maria Remarque: The Last Romantic

By Hilton Tims

Book Overview

For more than seventy years Erich Maria Remarque's startlingly realistic and intensely moving antiwar novel All Quiet on the Western Front has remained a worldwide best-seller. A political and literary sensation when it was first published, Remarque's masterpiece was banned and burned in the 1930s by the Nazis. Remarque himself was forced to flee Germany, and eventually, in 1939, he immigrated to America. A troubled man haunted by the horrors of Nazi Germany and embittered by his exile from the country he loved, Remarque strove to protect his privacy. In Hollywood glamour, in the beauties of art, in wealth, in the fame gained by successive best-sellers like Arch of Triumph, Remarque hid his torment and buried his fears. Love, too, held its woes for Remarque. Extraordinary, poignant, glamorous, the portrait that emerges in this potent biography of a modern literary giantthe story of a disadvantaged poor boy who at eighteen did indeed serve on the Western Front and subsequently molded himself into a cultured man of the worldis as extravagantly lit by romance as it is shadowed by anguish."

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0786711558
• ISBN13: 9780786711550
• Release Date: May 2003
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.3" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

A good approach to Remarque

This biography will satisfy most readers of Erich Maria Remarque's fiction. The author doesn't take a scholarly approach to Remarque's work, but then his novels probably don't deserve such serious treatment.Tims successfully provides an interesting account of the author's life and times. A good read.