B. Traven

Little about B. Traven’s life is completely certain, and that mystery has fascinated readers for decades. He is widely associated with the man known in Germany as Ret Marut, and he later lived in Mexico, where he wrote the novels and stories that made him famous.

His best-known books include The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Death Ship, and the six-volume Jungle Novels. Again and again, his fiction focuses on sailors, laborers, drifters, and Indigenous people, mixing fast-moving plots with anger at injustice, exploitation, and cruelty.

Traven guarded his privacy so fiercely that the question of who he really was became almost as famous as his work. What remains clear is the power of the books themselves: vivid, tough, and deeply sympathetic to people pushed to the margins.