He is best known for his novels of travels and adventures, set in the American Old West, the Orient, the Middle East, Latin America, China and Germany.

May was the fifth child of a poor family of weavers in Ernstthal, Schönburgische Rezessherrschaften (then part of the Kingdom of Saxony).

Shortly after graduation, when his roommate accused him of stealing a watch, May was jailed in Chemnitz for six weeks and his license to teach was revoked.

May managed entertainment papers such as Schacht und Hütte ("Mine and Mill") and continued to publish his own works such as Geographische Predigten ("Collected Travel Stories") (1876).

May was also published in the teenage boys' journal Der Gute Kamerad ("The Good Comrade") of Wilhelm Spemann, Stuttgart.

In 1891, Friedrich Ernst Fehsenfeld offered to print the Deutscher Hausschatz "Son of the Bear Hunter" stories as books.

May used many pseudonyms, including "Capitan Ramon Diaz de la Escosura", "D. Jam", "Emma Pollmer", "Ernst von Linden", "Hobble-Frank", "Karl Hohenthal", "M. Gisela", "P. van der Löwen", "Prinz Muhamel Lautréamont" and "Richard Plöhn".

In these, the narrator-protagonist, Kara Ben Nemsi, travels with his local guide and servant Hadschi Halef Omar through the Sahara desert to the Near East, experiencing many exciting adventures.

[citation needed] With few exceptions, May had not visited the places he described, but he compensated successfully for his lack of direct experience through a combination of creativity, imagination, and documentary sources including maps, travel accounts and guidebooks, as well as anthropological and linguistic studies.

The work of writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Gabriel Ferry, Friedrich Gerstäcker, Balduin Möllhausen and Mayne Reid served as his models.

[citation needed] Non-dogmatic Christian values play an important role in May's works.

[11] In his later works (after 1900) May left the adventure fiction genre to write symbolic novels with religious and pacifistic content.

Beyond these shorter cycles, the works are troubled by chronological inconsistencies arising when original articles were revised for book editions.

May's oeuvre includes some shorter travel stories that were not published within this series (for example, Eine Befreiung in Die Rose von Kaïrwan, 1894).

May was a member of the "Lyra" choir in about 1864 and composed musical works, including a version of Ave Maria and Vergiss mich nicht within Ernste Klänge, 1899.

Furthermore, there are posthumous publications of fragments of stories and dramas, lyrics, musical compositions, letters and the library catalog.

Since the closing of Nemsi Books in 2023, some of the English translations by Juergen Nett have been made available on Amazon through KDP.

"[21] and contributed to the popular image of Native Americans in German-speaking countries, which has been described by many as racist and harmful.

The wider influence on the populace also surprised US occupation troops after World War II, who realised that thanks to May, "Cowboys and Indians" were familiar concepts to local children (though fantastic and removed from reality).

May died suddenly only ten days after the lecture, leaving the young Hitler deeply upset.

[21] However, as told by Albert Speer, "when faced by seemingly hopeless situations, he [Hitler] would still reach for these stories," because "they gave him courage like works of philosophy for others or the Bible for elderly people.

[20] In his admiration, Hitler ignored May's Christian and humanitarian approach and views completely, not mentioning his relatively sympathetic description of Jews and other persons of non-Northern European ancestry.

We have those [pretending to be] Lakota, Oglala, Blackfeet, Blood, Siksika, Pawneee... and we go on the warpath against each other day and night, anytime at all.

[33]The German writer Carl Zuckmayer was intrigued by May's Apache chief and named his daughter Maria Winnetou.

He said, "When I was about 12 years old I wrote my first novel on Native Americans which was, of course, from the beginning to the end completely stolen from Karl May."

Several actors were employed, including Lex Barker (Old Shatterhand, Kara Ben Nemsi, Karl Sternau), Pierre Brice (Winnetou), Gojko Mitić (Winnetou), Stewart Granger (Old Surehand), Milan Srdoč (Old Wabble) and Ralf Wolter (Sam Hawkens, Hadschi Halef Omar, André Hasenpfeffer).

Other movies such as Die Spur führt zum Silbersee (1990) and TV productions such as Das Buschgespenst (1986) and the television series Kara Ben Nemsi Effendi (1973) were produced.

Comics based on May's novels were also produced in Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Mexico, Spain and Sweden.

[51] When the Nazis took over Germany, they appropriated the museum and the image of May, and were especially focused on swastikas that appeared in some of the Native American artwork.

Opposite the house is the International Karl May Heritage Center ("Karl-May-Begegnungsstätte"), which is used for events and special exhibitions.