Johannes Urzidil

Johannes Urzidil (3 February 1896 in Prague – 2 November 1970 in Rome) was a German-Bohemian writer, poet and historian.

Urzidil was educated in Prague, studying German, art history, and Slavic languages before turning to journalism and writing.

Although he published poetry, Urzidil is best known for his prose which, though written in exile, reflects his Bohemian heritage just as well as his new American environment.

Urzidil's only novel The Great Hallelujah (1959) shows as literary collage in the tradition of John Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe, and Alfred Döblin a manifold panorama of the United States as he experienced them since his arrival in 1941.

Goethe's View of America (1958), America and the Ancient World (1964), and There Goes Kafka (1965, enlarged 1966), or monographs about artists and poets he admired, such as Hollar, a Czech émigré in England (1942, revised and abridged translation of his German book Wenceslaus Hollar - the Engraver of the Baroque Era, 1936), or his opus magnum in this genre Goethe in Bohemia (1932, revised and enlarged 1962 and 1965).