Attila József

Attila József (born April 11, 1905, Budapest, Hung.—died Dec. 3, 1937, Balatonszárszó) was one of the greatest Hungarian poets of the 20th century. Although his first poems were published when he was 17, real renown came only after his death.

József was attracted by Marxist ideology and became a member of the then-illegal Communist Party. In 1932 he launched a short-lived literary periodical, Valóság, and in 1936 became one of the cofounders of the review Szép Szó. In his own poetry József presented intimate pictures of proletarian life. He immortalized his mother, a poor washerwoman, and made her a symbol of the working class. He created a style of melancholy realism, infused with irrationality, through which he was able to express the complex feelings of modern men and reveal his own faith in life’s essential beauty and harmony.