Ray Lewis White

Arnold Zweig in the USA - American University Studies Series 1: Germanic Languages and Literature Ray Lewis White First edition

By 1928, when Americans had almost 900 novels about World War I, the appearance of one German novel in English translation excited American readers more than had any other novel - Arnold Zweig's The Case of Sergeant Grischa. Amazed to learn the «other side» of the war from the perspective of the common soldier, American readers continued throughout the 1930's to enjoy Zweig's succeeding volumes about Grischa and to sympathize with his anti-Nazi activities in his exile from Germany. For reasons documented in Arnold Zweig in the USA, the writer after World War II never regained his 1930's popularity.
Arnold Zweig in the USA is the first study of this German author's American reception in the mass media of the 1920's, the 1930's, and the 1940's. A complete documentary record of the public commentary on Arnold Zweig and his fiction in America from 1929 through 1947, the volume will remain the most complete possible chronicle of one important aspect of the career and the achievement of this major world author.