Will the real B. Traven please stand up?
From our US edition
One hesitates to describe The Treasure of the Sierra Madre – perhaps now best known for its 1948 film adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart – as the great American novel, or even a great American novel. Its prose is too unwieldy, its structure too ungainly. While you, the reader, wish it spent more time with its characters – a trio of beat-up prospectors called Dobbs, Curtin and Howard – it is given to flights of economic theory about labor relations in 1920s Mexico, a setting great American novels don’t tend to trouble themselves with. Besides, its author, B. Traven, was almost certainly German and may never have spent time in the United States. Hang on. Almost certainly? May never?
