The Honors Student

Joseph Roth

1916

No, Anton Wanzl was not good. He lacked love, he lacked heart. He did only what he thought was clever and sensible. He gave no love and asked for none. He never needed any affection, any tenderness; he wasn’t given to feeling sorry for himself, he never cried. Anton Wanzl didn’t even have tears. A good boy wasn’t allowed to cry.

And so Anton Wanzl…

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Creator Bio

Joseph Roth

1894–1939

The German-language novelist and journalist Joseph Roth was born in Galicia and attended university in Lvov and Vienna. He served in World War I and witnessed the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire, experiences that were the focus of much of his fiction. In the interwar years, he lived and worked in Berlin and later Paris as a well-respected and highly paid journalist. His masterpiece was The Radetzky March (1924). He died of alcoholism just before the outbreak of World War II.

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