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LETTER FROM GERMANY; KARL MAY, STILL KING OF THE WILD FRONTIER

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From: The Washington Post
Date: 19950302
Author:Rick Atkinson

Seen through unsympathetic eyes, the writer Karl May was a scamp and a phony. A convicted thief and swindler who spent eight years in prison, he remained a compulsive spinner of self-aggrandizing tall tales almost until his death in 1912.

But May's mendacity was also his muse. He remains the most popular German author of all time, a relentless scribbler whose 80 million hardback copies in Germany alone far exceed the sales of such literary heavyweights as Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller. Translated into 28 languages, May's multinational ...

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