Karl Friedrich May (1842–1912) was a highly successful German writer best known for his vivid adventure novels set in exotic locales. Writing primarily in the first-person perspective, May crafted thrilling narratives of travel and exploration. His stories were most famously set in the American Old West and the Orient and Middle East, though his characters also ventured into Latin America, China, and Germany.
A defining aspect of May's career was his self-mythologizing. For a period, he claimed that his fictional adventures were autobiographical, insisting that he had personally traveled to the American West under the alias "Old Shatterhand" and traversed the Ottoman Empire as "Kara Ben Nemsi." To support these claims, he frequently posed for photographs in elaborate costumes representing his fictional alter egos.
May remains one of the best-selling German authors in history, with his works selling approximately 200 million copies worldwide. His enduring popularity in the German-speaking world and beyond was further cemented in the 1960s through a highly successful series of cinematic adaptations of his adventure tales.
