Ferenc Herczeg
1863–1954
Biography
Ferenc Herczeg was a Hungarian playwright and novelist, born Franz Herzog on 22 September 1863 in Versec, then in the Kingdom of Hungary and now Vršac in Serbia. He died in Budapest on 24 February 1954. His plays and novels were adapted for film in Hungary and abroad, and his work promoted a conservative, nationalist outlook for his country. He also took an active part in public life. From 1895 he launched and ran the periodical Új Idők, whose name means New Times, and he sat in parliament from 1896, later heading the Petőfi Society in 1901.
Herczeg was put forward for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925, 1926 and 1927, each time for The Gates of Life (1919), which centres on Tamás Bakócz, the one Hungarian who sought the papacy, and whose story unfolds in sixteenth-century Rome. Another well-known novel, Dream Country (1912), follows an affair between an American businessman and a Hungarian adventuress that ends in jealousy and murder during a yacht voyage. Many of his books return to a wealthy heir at odds with a brother, cousin or rival who has been denied what is legally his.
The book on this site, A Gyurkovics-lányok (The Gyurkovics Girls, 1893), is one of his early novels about a family. A second volume about the family's sons, The Gyurkovics Boys, appeared in 1895. A Swedish film of 1920 used the family's name as its title, which shows how far the stories travelled. His conservative nationalism runs through his public career and his fiction alike, so it is worth keeping in mind while reading him.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
A Gyurkovics-lányok
by Ferenc Herczeg
A Gyurkovics-lányok (lit. 'The Gyurkovics Girls') is an 1893 novel by the Hungarian writer Ferenc Herczeg. In the novel, a Hungarian mother marries off her seven daughters in clever ways. The book explores "the native traditions... concerning matrimony as the single career open…
Summary from Wikipedia: A Gyurkovics-lányok (CC BY-SA 4.0)