The legendary Austro-Hungarian novelist and essayist, Joseph Roth, was born in Ukraine in 1894 and died tragically in Paris in 1939. These letters span the breadth of Roth's life, from his schoolboy years to the veteran of 44, marked by war, poverty, alcoholism, the loss of his wife through madness, and two decades of prolific work. It is a deeply moving portrait of the life of the writer as an outsider; in exile from a world he no longer recognized as his own.