Influenced by the generation of writers who in the first decades of the twentieth century embraced European modernism as a means to revolutionize Hungarian literature, Miklós Radnóti emerged in the late 1920s as a gifted poet possessed of the ability to transcend the depth of personal despair with dignity and compassion. He himself became a victim of World War II atrocities: after being sent to forced labor, he was executed and buried in a mass grave. Although Radnóti produced only a limited body of work, he is generally acknowledged as one of the most significant writers in twentieth-century Hungarian literature.

Miklós Radnóti was born on 5 May 1909 in Budapest to Jakab Glatter, a clerk, and Ilona Grósz. Like many others of Jewish origin who abandoned their foreign-sounding--mostly German--surnames, the poet changed Glatter to Radnóti, drawing...