Writer of the bestseller :"The Song of Bernadette" 

Franz Werfel was born in Prague in 1890, the son of middle-class Jews.He died in Los Angeles in 1945, the renowed author of such best-sellers as The forty Days of Musa Dagh and The song of Bernadette.

In this first full-length biography, Peter Stephan Jungk tells the story of Werfel's odyssey from Central Europe to California as a mirror of the political upheavals of the times. Werfel was a key figure in the Prague literary cirle that included Kafka and Max Brod, and he debated issues of Judaism with Freud and Buber. Drawn into the orbit of Alma Malher, widow of the composer and wife of the great architect Walter Gropius , he frequented her famous salon along with Schönberg, Broch, Berg and Hauptmann.He traded insults with Karl Kraus in the Viennese press and Verdi arias with James Joyce in a Paris restaurant. In a dramatic crossing of the Pyrenees (Lourdes) on foot, he fled Europe in 1940.