Dalmatia has bequeathed great storytellers to Croatian literature, including Vladan Desnica, Vjekoslav Kaleb, Petar Segedin, and Vladimir Nazor. Yet Ranko Marinkovic stands out among them. The corpus of his creative works may be modest in comparison to some, but his work is finely honed and of universal appeal. Even when the settings of his tales are provincial, Marinkovic's meditations on the modern human condition are applicable to all. For that reason, certain works by Marinkovic have been widely translated, and he has done much to promote his nation's literature on the contemporary European literary scene.

Ranko Marinkovic was born on 22 February 1913 on the island of Vis. He led an isolated early childhood, which coincided with World War I. His formal education began in 1919, just after the war. He attended elementary school on Vis and high school in Split and Zagreb. Infected with the spirit of "world crisis" during...