1933

• Elected President of the Hungarian Literary Academy (aged 32)
• First novel The Pendragon Legend published

1935 & 1937

• Awarded the Baumgarten Prize

1937

• His best-known work, Utas és holdvilág (Journey by Moonlight) published
• Becomes a literature professor at the University of Szeged

ADDITIONAL WORKS INCLUDE

• Translations from English, French, and Italian, including works by Anatole France, P. G. Wodehouse, and Hugh Walpole.
• History of World Literature (1941) which continues to be authoritative today.
• Volume on the theory of the novel and a book about the history of Hungarian literature.

Szerb was born in 1901 to assimilated Jewish parents in Budapest, but baptized Catholic. He studied Hungarian, German and later English, obtaining a doctorate in 1924. From 1924 to 1929 he lived in France and Italy, also spending a year in London, England, from 1929 to 1930. Given numerous chances to escape anti-Semitic persecution (as late as 1944), he chose to remain in Hungary, where his last novel, a Pirandellian fantasy about a king staging a coup against himself, then having to impersonate himself, Oliver VII, was published in 1942. It was passed off as a translation from the English, as no 'Jewish' work could be printed at the time. During the 1940s, Szerb faced increasing hostility due to his Jewish background. In 1943, Szerb's History of World Literature was put on a list of forbidden works. During the period of Communist rule, it would also be censored, with the chapter on Soviet literature redacted, and the full version would only be available again in 1990. Szerb was deported to a concentration camp in Balf late in 1944. Admirers of his attempted to save him with falsified papers, but Szerb turned them down, wanting to share the fate of his generation.[2] He was beaten to death there in January 1945, at the age of 43. He was survived by his wife, Klára Bálint, who died in 1992.