Erich Maria Remarque: The Last Romantic

For more than seventy years Erich Maria Remarque’s startlingly realistic and intensely moving antiwar novel All Quiet on the Western Front has remained a worldwide best-seller. A political and literary sensation when it was first published, Remarque’s masterpiece was banned and burned in the 1930s by the Nazis. Remarque himself was forced to flee Germany, and eventually, in 1939, he immigrated to America. A troubled man haunted by the horrors of Nazi Germany and embittered by his exile from the country he loved, Remarque strove to protect his privacy. In Hollywood glamour, in the beauties of art, in wealth, in the fame gained by successive best-sellers like Arch of Triumph, Remarque hid his torment and buried his fears. Love, too, held its woes for Remarque. Extraordinary, poignant, glamorous, the portrait that emerges in this potent biography of a modern literary giant—the story of a disadvantaged poor boy who at eighteen did indeed serve on the Western Front and subsequently molded himself into a cultured man of the world—is as extravagantly lit by romance as it is shadowed by anguish.