Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz

Bruno Schulz (1892 - 1942) was a Polish Jewish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher. He is regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century. In 1938, he was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award. Several of Schulz's works were lost in the Holocaust, including short stories from the early 1940s and his final, unfinished novel The Messiah. Schulz was shot and killed by a German Nazi in 1942 while walking back home toward Drohobycz Ghetto with a loaf of bread. In his brilliant, intensely illuminated fiction, Schulz evoked a glorious world through a magical combination of personal myth, fantasy, and highly sensual language. "If Schulz had been allowed to live out his life," Isaac Bashevis Singer has said, "he might have given us untold treasures, but what he did in his short life was enough to make him one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived". This is the first English translation of Schulz's collected letters, and it includes as well 75 drawings and photos and nine pieces - essays, interviews, and narratives - previously uncollected in English. Schulz's letters shed light on the genesis of his small but stunning literary oeuvre. As it stands, this collection, painstakingly gathered by Jerzy Ficowski over a period of four decades, constitutes a remarkable portrait of a remarkable artist.