B. Traven

B. Traven was an enigmatic novelist who wrote in German, and who is most famous for having written the novel that was the basis for the Humphrey Bogart movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Traven wrote numerous other novels such as The Death Ship and The Rebellion of the Hanged.

Little is known about the man himself; it is not even whether he was German or merely wrote in the language. It is clear from the the descriptions in his novels that he must have at least travelled extensively (if not lived) in Europe, the United States and Mexico.

On the basis of comparing writing styles, it has been suggested that Traven was a pseudonym for the German anarchist Ret Marut, who published an underground magazine in the last years of the Weimar Republic. Another identity for Traven may have been "Traven's agent", the seemingly English Hal Croves who met with director John Huston during the filming of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

In any case, it is clear that Traven, like the American authors Thomas Pynchon and JD Salinger, delighted in his personal anonymity.

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