Karl May

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 3…