Towards the end of the 19th century, there arose a uniquely European genre of stories about the American West, a frontier by then tamed from the general lawlessness that had prevailed in earlier decades. Influenced by James Fenimore Cooper’s novels dating from the first half of that century, Buffalo Bill Cody’s shows and other accounts, British, Scandinavian and German writers developed their own characters and plots in which they portrayed an American Wild West which was then already both legend and history. The stories of the most prolific writer, the German Karl May, (pronounced “my”) have been translated into many other languages. Sales of his books in Europe are exceeded only by those of the Bible. Generations of Germans grew up reading May, the titan of popular German writings, much more than literary greats like Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Heine, Nietzsche and others. While May’s plots and character development are generally not deep, he never failed to create exciting stories, catching the enthusiasm of readers young and old even as long as a century later, among them such luminaries as Albert Einstein.
