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Karl Friedrich May (February 25, 1842 - March 30, 1912) was the best selling German writer of all time, noted chiefly for wild west books set in the American West and similar books set in the Middle East; in addition, he also wrote some lesser-known stories set in his native Germany, some poetry, an autobiography, and a play. May also dabbled as a musical composer, writing two very famous romantic German songs, "Forget Me Not" and a version of "Ave Maria".
May was born blind and received sight only after an operation at age eight. Before he took up writing, he was a poor assistant teacher. During this time he repeatedly got into trouble with the law and was jailed a number of times, mostly for small thefts. He first began writing for magazines in his spare time to relieve his poverty. Many of his books are written as first-person accounts by the narrator-protagonist, and he sometimes claimed that he actually experienced the events he described; this might have been a case of pseudologia (compulsory lying), which he had already shown before his writing career.
He used many different pen names, including Capitain Ramon Diaz de la Escosura, M. Gisela, Hobble-Frank, Karl Hohenthal, D. Jam, Prinz Muhamel Lautréamont, Ernst von Linden, P. van der Löwen, Emma Pollmer, Richard Plöhn, and Oberlehrer Franz Langer. Today his works are all published under his own name.
He visited North America only in 1908, well after writing the books set there, never getting west of Buffalo, New York. This lack of direct experience of the Western milieu he successfully compensated for by an ingenious combination of creativity, imagination, and factual sources including maps, travel accounts and guide books, as well as anthropological and linguistic studies.
Well aware of his target audience, "true", i.e., non-dogmatic Christian feelings and values play an important role, and his "good guys" are often described as being of German descent; in addition, following the romantic ideal of the "noble savage", his Red Indians are generally portrayed as innocent victims of white aggression, and many of them are presented as heroic characters of almost superhuman abilities. Especially in his later works, there is a strong air of mysticism, often personified as the mysterious old woman Marah Durimeh.
In the books set in America, May invented the characters of Winnetou, the wise chief of the Apache Tribe, and Old Shatterhand, the authors alter ego and Winnetou's white blood brother. - Another very successful series of books is set in Arabia. Here the narrating protagonist calls himself Kara Ben Nemsi, i.e., Karl, son of Germany, and travels with his local guide and servant Hadschi Halef Omar through the Sahara desert and the Near East, all the while experiencing many exciting adventures. - Both sets of books are linked not only by the common narrator, the author himself as either Old Shatterhand or Kara ben Nemsi, but also by numerous other references and shared minor characters.
May's works were immensely successful in continental Europe and many other parts of the world, translated into well over thirty different languages including Latin, Volapük, and Esperanto, and selling over 200 million copies world-wide. Still, he is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, though this is slowly beginning to change. Several of his novels were made into films, most of which were shot in the West-lookalike mountains of the former Yugoslavia. See also Spaghetti Western.
Even long after his death May is blamed for being praised by Adolf Hitler. Other prominent admirers of his are said to have been Albert Einstein, Hermann Hesse and Bertha von Suttner. Literary criticism has typically regarded May's books as trivial.
May's house in Radebeul near Dresden in Germany has been turned into a museum devoted to Karl May and his anthropological collection of artifacts of native American Indian origin.
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