Background
His father, sisters, and their families died in concentration camps.
His father, sisters, and their families died in concentration camps.
He studied at the gymnasium in Náchod in 1927, then philosophy in Prague and at university in Vienna in 1929, but did not graduate.
He was related to the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. He returned to Prague in 1930 and worked as an editor in several publishing houses. In 1937 Hostovský joined the Czechoslovakian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in 1939 he was posted to Brussels, from where, after the occupation of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939, he emigrated to Paris.
After Paris was occupied in 1940, he fled to Portugal and then, in 1941, travelled to the United States of America, where he worked in New York at the Czechoslovakian (exile government"s) consulate.
After World World War II he returned to Czechoslovakia and again worked at the Foreign Ministry, but in 1948 he left into his second exile, to Denmark, and then to Norway and finally to the United States, where he worked as a Czechoslovakian language teacher and later as a journalist and editor at Radio Free Europe. Several of his novels, including The Midnight Patient and Three Nights, were translated in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Philip Hillyer Smith, Junior., a scholar of linguistics and the Czechoslovakian language.
Their son Paul (b 1959) is a poet.