Background
Gyula Krúdy was born in Nyíregyháza, Hungary. His father was a lawyer and his mother was a maid working for the Krúdy family. Although his father wanted him to become a lawyer, Krúdy worked as an editor at provincial newspapers (Debrecen, Nagyvárad) for several years, then moved to Budapest in 1896.
Career
In his teens, Krúdy published newspaper pieces and began writing short stories. Sinbad"s Youth, published in 1911, proved a success, and Krúdy used the character, a man who shared the name of the hero of the Arabian Nights, many times throughout his career. Another alter ego, Kazmer Rezeda, is the hero of half a dozen novels, including The Crimson Coach (1913), English translation by Paul Tabori published in 1965.
Also highly regarded are the novels Sunflower (English translation published by New York Review Books in their Classics series in 2007, with an Introduction by John Lukacs) and Ladies Day, English translation published by Corvina (Budapest, 2007).
Krúdy"s last collection of stories, Life Is a Dream, has also appeared in English translation (Penguin Books, 2010). Krúdy"s novels about Budapest were popular during the First World War but afterward he was often broke due to excessive drinking and gambling.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Krúdy"s health declined and his readership dwindled. This book"s success brought Krúdy"s works back to the Hungarian public.
The edition of his Collected Works published by Szépirodalmi (Budapest, 1978–1989) ran to twenty volumes, and an edition of Krúdy"s Complete Works, projected as 50 volumes, is currently under way (Kalligramm, Bratislava, since 2005).
He was called "a Hungarian Proust" by critic Charles Champlin in The New York Times. His bibliography by Mihály Gedényi (Budapest, 1978) contains 4846 items. There is a permanent exhibit on Krúdy"s life at the Hungarian Museum of Commerce and Tourism, which is located in a building in Óbuda in which he lived for the last three years of his life.