born Aug. 10, 1878, Stettin, Ger.
died June 26, 1957, Emmendingen, near Freiburg im Breisgau, W.Ger.
German novelist and essayist.
He studied medicine at the Universities of Berlin and Freiburg, specializing in psychiatry. His first novel, The Three Leaps of Wang-Lun (1915), describes the quashing of a rebellion in China. His best-known work, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929; film, 1931; adapted for television, 1980), is written in an Expressionist vein and dramatizes the miseries of working-class life in a disintegrating social order. His Jewish ancestry and socialist views compelled him to leave Germany upon the Nazi takeover, and he fled to France (1933) and then to the U.S. (1940), resettling in Paris in the early 1950s.