Karl May
1842–1912
Biography
Karl May (1842–1912) was a German author of adventure and travel stories, and among the most widely sold German-language writers ever. He was born at Ernstthal in Saxony, the fifth child of a poor family of weavers, and his youth was marked by trouble with the law. From 1865 to 1869 he was held in the workhouse at Osterstein Castle in Zwickau. There he was given a post looking after the prison library, which gave him plenty of time to read.
Most of his stories were set in the American West, the Ottoman lands and the wider Middle East, though some went further afield. Many first ran as magazine instalments and were revised when they came out as books. For a time May insisted that he had really travelled the places he wrote about, and in those stories the narrator is called Old Shatterhand in the West and Kara Ben Nemsi in the Orient. Winnetou (1893), the tale of an Apache chief who becomes the narrator's friend and blood brother, is his most famous book. Sales are often put at around 200 million copies worldwide, and a run of film adaptations in the 1960s brought his work to a new audience.
The edition listed on this site has the Swedish title Abu-Seif: Äventyrsroman från Röda Havet och Mekka, meaning an adventure novel from the Red Sea and Mecca, and it is credited to Kurt Lange as translator. It belongs to the Middle Eastern side of May's output, which ran alongside the American tales. For details of his time in prison, his later allegorical writings and the rest of his life, the English article on him is the place to check.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
Abu-Seif: Äventyrsroman från Röda Havet och Mekka
by Karl May (translated by Kurt Lange)
Kara Ben Nemsi and his loyal servant Hadschi Halef Omar sail the Red Sea and fall foul of Abu-Seif, a pirate who preys on its coasts, an adventure that takes them toward the forbidden city of Mecca. A Karl May adventure in Kurt Lange's Swedish translation, full of captures…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.