Karl May

Karl May (1842 to 1912) was a German author who became one of the best-selling writers in the German language. Born into a poor family of weavers at Ernstthal in the Kingdom of Saxony, he spent years in prison for theft and fraud before turning to writing in 1874. He wrote travel and adventure novels in the first person, set mostly in the American Old West and the Orient, and created the figures Winnetou, the Apache chief, and Old Shatterhand, together with Kara Ben Nemsi and his companion Hadschi Halef Omar in the Ottoman world. His best known works are the Orient Cycle and the Winnetou trilogy, collected in the Gesammelte Reiseromane from 1892. For a time he claimed to have really visited the places he described, though he drew largely on maps, travel accounts and guidebooks. After about 1900 he left plain adventure fiction for symbolic novels with religious and pacifist themes. He died at his villa in Radebeul in 1912, and about 200 million copies of his books have been sold worldwide.