Jenő Rejtő was a Hungarian journalist, pulp fiction writer and playwright who died as a forced labourer during World War II. He was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, on March 29, 1905, and died in Evdakovo, Voronezh Oblast, Soviet Union on January 1, 1943. Despite the "pulp" nature of his writings, he is not only widely read in Hungary, but is also much appreciated by literary critics. It is a prevalent opinion that he lifted the genre to the level of serious art, and his works will long outlive him.
Biography
Jenő Rejtő completed his studies in a drama school in 1924, after which he travelled extensively throughout Europe. Returning to Hungary, he made his living as a playwright, often with great success, such as with his operetta, Aki mer, az nyer. Later, he started to write adventure novels based on his trips and experiences abroad. His novels were raised above mediocrity by his inimitable and bizarre sense of humour. His novels parodying the French Foreign Legion, written under the pseudonym P. Howard, reaped the greatest success. He also wrote a large number of cabaret farces and edited a newspaper, Nagykörút, which, however, was published just once. His most appreciated novels are stories unifying elements from detective novels and romance, always including a unique sense of humour. He also wrote novels in the tradition of American Westerns. Starting in 1939, he could not publish his novels any more under his own name because of his Jewish origins. On October 9, 1942, an article in the Nazi Arrow Cross Party’s newspaper exposed Rejtő as a Jew and reported that he was seen writing calmly in Budapest cafés while evading the labour service draft that was compulsory for Jewish men of military age. He was seriously ill by this time but was taken by force from hospital to do his labour service on the eastern front, into the Soviet Union, where he shortly died of typhus.
Legacy
In the early years of communism his works were only available on the black market as pre-war editions, but from the 1960s on, his novels were republished, and they gained instant popularity in Hungary. They elicit a cult following to this day. Some of his works have been made into films and comic books. Rejtő’s comic book adaptations by Pál Korcsmáros are regarded as classics in their own right in Hungary. While a writer, he was a regular customer at the Cafe Japan in Budapest, which was near Nova, his publisher. He paid for his coffee with lines written on napkins, which in turn were taken to Nova, where they were purchased and collated. Rejtő's memory is kept alive in Budapest in various ways: in 2001 a street was named after him, while in 2003 there was an exhibition dedicated to him in the Petőfi Museum of Literature. In 2005 his picture appeared on a Hungarian postage stamp, part of the series "Great Hungarians", and there is an initiative to erect his statue in Budapest.
Works
The original Hungarian editions of Rejtő's numerous works—the most famous of which are his Foreign Legion books and his "Dirty Fred" series—were already in the public domain in the 1990s. However, since Hungary implemented the EUcopyright extension retroactively in 1999, Rejtő's works became again subject to copyright when sold in EU countries ; they entered the public domain everywhere on 1 January 2014. English translations of some of his works are available online:
