Hans Otto Storm (1895–1941) was aGerman-Americannovelist andradio engineer.[1] His literary reputation quickly faded into obscurity after his early death, but in the 1940s received some positive praise from literary criticEdmund Wilson.[2]
He is one of many people who has been speculatively suggested to be thepseudonymous writerB. Traven.[3]
Storm was born inBloomington, California to German parents who may have beenrefugees fleeing anti-socialist fervor following the failedRevolutions of 1848.[3] He studied engineering atStanford University and entered the emerging field ofradio. He traveled inSouth andCentral America, including long spells inNicaragua andPeru.[3] He served two years with aUnited States Armyhospital duringWorld War I.[3]
Storm died of accidentalelectrocution on December 11, 1941, a few days after theattack on Pearl Harbor, while rushing to complete a large radiotransformer for theArmy Signal Corps in a laboratory inSan Francisco.[1][3]
His literary papers are archived atBancroft Library at theUniversity of California, Berkeley.[4]
Storm's first novel,Full Measure (1929), is about industrial expansion and is strongest on the subject of radio engineering and equipment.[1] It "received mildly positive reviews but sold little over a thousand copies."[1] His next novel,Pity the Tyrant (1937), is about an American engineer who becomes involved in a Peruvian revolution[1] who is "sorely perplexed between his job, his proletarian political sympathies and his love affair with a South American lady."[2]Edmund Wilson considered it Storm's best work.[2] The tyrant of the title is based onAugusto Leguía,President of Peru from 1919 to 1930, "whose rule was marked by rebellion, suppression of his opponents, and widespread corruption."[1] His next novel,Made in the USA (1939) is a "social fable"[2] about atramp steamer full of passengers that becomes stuck on a sandbar in the South Pacific.[1] Civilized behavior deteriorates and the passengers break into two warring camps.
His last novel,Count Ten (1940) is his longest and most heavily marketed;[2] it follows thirty years of the life of its protagonist, Eric Marsden.[1] In Edmund Wilson’s estimation, the novel is "very much inferior on the whole to the ones that had gone before."[2] Wilson also thought that it showed "what seemed internal evidence of having been written earlier," giving off the air of "one of thoseautobiographical novels that young men begin in college and carry around for years in old trunks."[2]
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