János Kemény (writer)

Baron János Kemény (5 September 1903 – 13 October 1971) was a Hungarian writer, theater director, dramatist, and founder of the Marosvécs/Brâncoveneşti Helikon community.

His mother, the actress Ida Berenice Mitchell (1871-1956), lost her husband, István Kemény, shortly after János was born and could not afford to support her four children.

[1] For ten years from 1931, he headed the Hungarian Thália Theater in Kolozsvár/Cluj and also published literary work.

However, he was obliged to do manual work in the communist period, before later finding a job in the library of Târgu Mureş (Marosvásárhely) art college and working on the Hungarian-language magazine Új Élet in the same city.

A succession of his works appeared between 1957 and his death, in Târgu Mureş, in 1971, but he managed to complete only one volume of a planned autobiography.