Egon Hostovsky made an original contribution to twentieth-century European and American literature with works that portray modern man's existentialist feelings of alienation and rootlessness. In his stories Hostovsky depicted weak, defenseless individuals (mostly Jews and exiles from Europe) threatened by a hostile world, and he allegorized their fate in terms of the fall of humanity into the dark regions of alienation and the absurdity of stereotyped human relations. Hostovsky's works attracted the attention of an international public chiefly during the 1940s and 1950s. At that time, however, Franz Kafka had been rediscovered, and Hostovsky's works were often misinterpreted by being linked with his.

Egon Hostovsky, the youngest of eight children, was born on 23 April 1908 in Hronov, in East Bohemia. His father, Josef Hostovsky, was one of the owners of a textile factory, but this unsuccessful business became the source of family tensions that marked Hostovsky's childhood. The author...