Hermann Broch

Hermann Broch was born on November 1, 1886, into an affluent Jewish textile family in Vienna. After managing his family's cotton spinning mills for two decades, Broch made the radical decision in 1927 at age 40 to sell the factories and study philosophy, mathematics, and psychology at the University of Vienna.

Between 1931 and 1932, he published his monumental trilogy 'The Sleepwalkers' (Die Schlafwandler), an astonishing exploration of the decay of ethical values in modern European civilization. Following the Nazi annexation of Austria (Anschluss) in 1938, Broch was imprisoned by the Gestapo but rescued through the international intervention of James Joyce, Aldous Huxley, and Thomas Mann.

Exiled to the United States, Broch completed 'The Death of Virgil' (1945) at Princeton, hailed as one of the greatest lyrical prose masterpieces of the 20th century, exploring the dying Roman poet's realization of art's limitations before passing away at Yale in 1951.