Egon Hostovský
Egon Hostovský (23 April 1908, Hronov – 7 May 1973, Montclair, New Jersey) was a Czech writer, editor and journalist. Biography. Born to a Jewish family, Hostovský studied at the gymnasium in Náchod in 1927, then took up philosophy in Prague. He briefly attended the University of Vienna in 1929, but he did not graduate. He returned to Prague in 1930 and worked as an editor in several publishing houses. In 1937, Hostovský joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in 1939, he was sent on a tour of the Benelux countries. He was there when the German occupation  of Czechoslovakia took place, so he settled in Paris. After Paris was occupied in 1940, he fled to Portugal and then, in 1941, he travelled to the United States, where he worked in New York City at the consulate of Czechoslovakia's government-in-exile. While there, his Jewish family was persecuted by the Nazis. His father, sisters, and their families died in the Nazi concentration camps. After World War II, in 1946, he returned to Czechoslovakia and again worked at the Foreign Ministry, but in 1948, following the communist coup d'état, he began his second exile, first to Denmark , then to Norway and finally to the United States, where he worked as a Czech language teacher and later as a journalist and editor at Radio Free Europe. He remained there for the rest of his life and became a U.S. Citizen in 1957. He continued to write in Czech. Several of his novels, including "The Midnight Patient" and "Three Nights", were translated in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Philip Hillyer Smith, Jr., a scholar of linguistics and the Czech language. After his death, a literary prize, the , was founded in his name by his third wife. Their  son (b. 1958) is a poet He was related to the Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, whom he described as "a very distant relative". Some sources describe them as cousins. Works. His work is influenced by his Jewish origin and exile. His literary heroes fight (inner) evil, due to political situation are forced to leave their country and search for lost certainties and roots. Before his first emigration his work was influenced by expressionism. His work is included in: References to him are made in the following books: