Mór Jókai
1825–1904
Biography
Mór Jókai lived from 1825 to 1904. He was a Hungarian novelist, playwright and revolutionary, and he was among the leaders who launched the 1848 uprising in Pest, a city now part of Budapest. Outside Hungary he was also known as Maurus Jókai, Maurice Jókai or Mauritius Jókai, and under those names his novels reached readers far beyond his own language.
After the revolution was defeated he turned to writing and became one of the most widely read novelists of his country. His romantic novels were hugely popular in Victorian England, where the press often compared him with Charles Dickens, and Queen Victoria was among his admirers. He wrote a great many novels and some plays, drawing on Hungarian history, its landscapes and its turbulent politics.
Two of his novels are on this site. Fekete gyémántok (Black Diamonds) is set in the Hungarian coal-mining country, and Rab Ráby is another novel from the same long career. Both show the storytelling energy that made him famous, and both are a good way into a writer who was once widely read across Europe.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Fekete gyémántok
by Mór Jókai
Iván Berend, a scholar and engineer, works his coal mines in a remote valley and treats his miners fairly, while financiers in Vienna and Pest dream up a railway and mining company built on speculation. Jókai sets his upright hero against the bankers and high society, with a…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.Rab Ráby: Regény
by Mór Jókai
Mátyás Ráby, an official in the reign of Joseph II, exposes the corruption of a town magistracy near Pest-Buda and spends years paying for it as the officials he crossed close ranks against him. Jókai built the novel on the real Ráby's memoir, told with comedy and anger, each…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.