Karl May is read about 1,015 times a day, in 53 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 15 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 390 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?A German novelist who never saw the American West but convinced millions he'd lived it - writing first-person frontier adventures from a Saxony desk and, for years, insisting the tales were his own.
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About this person
Karl Friedrich May was born 25 February 1842 in Germany and spent his career spinning vivid first-person narratives set in the American Old West, the Ottoman Empire, Latin America, and beyond - places he largely never visited. He claimed to be Old Shatterhand in the West and Kara Ben Nemsi in the East, even posing in costume to sustain the fiction. The impersonation held for years, and the books moved regardless: about 200 million copies sold worldwide, making him one of Germany's best-selling authors of all time. A wave of film adaptations in the 1960s carried the mythology further. He died 30 March 1912, the adventure intact on every page, the geography all in his head.
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