Oskar Maria Graf (born July 22 1894 in Berg, Bavaria ; died June 28 1967 in New York) was a German author.
He wrote several socialist-anarchist novels and narratives about life in Bavaria, mostly autobiographical.
In the beginning Graf wrote under his real name Oskar Graf. Since 1918, he edited his works for newspapers under the pseudonym, Oskar Graf-Berg; for himself as "worth being read", regarded his works, he selected the name Oskar Maria Graf.
An apprentice baker, Graf went to Munich in 1911, where he supported himself with a variety of menial jobs. Drafted into military service, he was a soldier at the Russian front during World War I. He joined a revolutionary socialist group and participated in a strike by munitions workers and in the November Revolution that resulted in the short-lived Socialist Republic of Bavaria. After its demise in 1919, Graf worked as a director for the Munich Workers’ Theatre before turning to writing. In 1933 Graf fled Germany for Vienna and later for Czechoslovakia, and in 1938 he left Europe and eventually settled in New York.
His early work centres on themes of social revolution and protest, ideas that were never totally absent from his work, but he found his genre in stories of Bavarian folk life. He was concerned about the effects of modernity on traditional lives. Those fears are voiced in several novels about the future, in particular his utopian novel, Die Eroberung der Welt (1949; “The Conquest of the World”), reissued as Die Erben des Untergangs (1959; “The Heirs of the Ruins”).
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