The Austrian poet, novelist, and playwright Franz Werfel (1890-1945) was a leading representative of the expressionist movement in German literature.

Franz Werfel was born on Sept. 10, 1890, in Prague, the son of a Jewish businessman. He studied at the universities of Prague, Leipzig, and Hamburg and then worked (1912-1914) as a reader for a publishing house. After service in World War I (1915-1917) he lived and worked as a professional writer.

Werfel's first achievement was a play, Besuch aus dem Elysium (1909), which was followed by Die Troerinnen (1915), an expressionistic reworking of Euripides's The Trojan Women. However, his reputation was made by his lyric poetry, which he published in such collections as Der Weltfreund (1911) and Wir Sind (1913). His lyric poetry is distinctive and of considerable quality; like his plays, it is passionate, often ecstatic and rhapsodic, but equally often inclined toward the abstruse and the ratiocinative; tightly knit and full...