Heinrich Hauser was a prolific German writer and journalist who published numerous novels (in Germany with the renowned Fischer-Verlag), travel books, political books (especially about the situation of postwar Germany), autobiographical works about his adventures, and reportages for German and American newspapers and magazines (for instance the Frankfurter Zeitung). A great traveller and adventurer, Hauser also became a well known photographer and movie maker. Thus he shot a movie on his sea voyage from Hamburg to South America aboard the the Pamir in 1930, and published the account of this voyage in a book which - like a number of his novels and other books - were translated into English (Fair Winds and Foul).
Between 1936 and 1938 Hauser travelled to Australia, South-Eastern Europe and Canada, and wrote extensive books about these countries and cultures, among them Australien: der fünfte Kontinent. In 1939 he emigrated to the USA where he continued writing and publishing, and also worked a farm in Missouri, an experience he described with great local colour and regional knowledge in My Farm on the Mississippi: The Story of a German in Missouri, 1945-1948 (1950; English trans. 2001).
In 1948 Hauser sold his farm and returned to Germany. For a short time he became the editor of the German magazine Stern, and he continued his successful writing career. He died in Diessen on Ammersee (Bavaria) in 1955. Some of his novels continue to be reprinted and reviewed (for instance Thunder above the Sea), and recently a German PhD thesis on Hauser's life and work was published (Grith Graebner, Dem Leben unter die Haut kriechen: Heinrich Hauser, Leben und Werk, Aachen: Shaker, 2001).
