Books by Franz Werfel

Franz Werfel (born 1890) was already a successful writer when in 1933 he published The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, inspired by the desperate plight of Armenian children he had seen working in a Syrian carpet factory. A bestseller and Werfel's masterpiece, the book brought the Armenian genocide to the world's attention for the first time but was burned by the Nazis. Werfel, an Austrian Jew, was forced to flee Europe, narrowly escaping with his life. He died in Los Angeles in 1945.