The Academy of Arts and Sciences, founded by Szecheni, offered a prize for the best drama, and Jokai won it. He was then seventeen, for careers began early in olden times. When twenty-one his first novel, "Work Days," met with great applause; other romances quickly followed, and, as they dealt with the social and political tendencies that fanned the revolution into flame two years later, their success was instantaneous. His true representations of Hungarian life and character, his passionate love of liberty, his lofty idealism for his crushed and lethargic country, aroused a great wave of patriotism like a call to arms, and consecrated him to work with his pen for the freedom of the common people. -- From Neltje Blanchan's Introductory Sketch of the Author

Author Biography

Moric Jokay de Asva (1825 - 1904), outside Hungary also known as Maurus Jokai, was a Hungarian dramatist and novelist. Jokai was extremely prolific. It was to literature that he continued to devote most of his time and his productiveness after 1870 was stupendous, amounting to some hundreds of volumes. Stranger still, none of this work is slipshod and the best of it deserves to endure. Amongst the finest of his later works may be mentioned the unique and incomparable Az arany ember (A Man of Gold, translated into English, among others, under the title The Man with the Golden Touch), the most popular A koszivu ember fiai (The Heartless Man's Sons), the heroic chronicle of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 and A tengerszemu holgy (Eyes like the Sea), the latter of which won the Academy's prize in 1890. He was also an amateur chess player. His jovo szazad regenye (The novel of the next century - 1872) is accounted an important early work of Science Fiction though the term did not yet exist at the time. In spite of its romantic trappings, this monumental two-volume novel includes some acute observations and almost prophetic visions, such as the prediction of a revolution in Russia and the establishment of a totalitarian state there, or the arrival of aviation. Because it could be read as a satirical allegory on Leninism and Stalinism in the Soviet Union, the book was banned in Hungary in the decades of the Communist regime. (Its "Critical Edition" was delayed until 1981.)