All Quiet on the Western Front

Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) was born in Osnabrück, Germany, of French ancestry. He studied at the University of Münster but had to enlist in the German army at the age of eighteen. He fought on the Western Front and was wounded several times. He began his writing career as a journalist. Fame came with his first novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), which sold more than a million copies in its first year and created a new literary genre of veterans writing about conflict. He left Germany in 1932 because of Nazism, came to the United States in 1939, and became a US citizen in 1947. All Quiet on the Western Front was adapted to film in 1930.