Lion Feuchtwanger, novelist and dramatist, was born in Munich, Germany, the son of a wealthy manufacturer. The rise of the Nazis drove him to France, and after the collapse of that country he escaped to Spain with great difficulty. He reached the United States in 1940. A major work is his trilogy on the Jewish historian: Josephus (1932), The Jew of Rome (1935), and Josephus and the Emperor (1942). He was best known in Germany as a dramatist, but his international success was due to his revival of the historical novel written with modern psychological understanding.