Franz Werfel's masterpiece tells the true story of the inhabitants of six Armenian villages on the mountain of Musa Dagh, who choose to defy the deportation order of the Turkish government and are subsequently besieged on the mountainside. Told through the eyes of Gabriel Bagradian, a cosmopolitan Armenian who has returned to his home village with his French wife and son after years living in Europe, the novel is a rich and dramatic epic that powerfully argues for the value of resistance even in impossible circumstances.

Author Biography

Franz Werfel (born 1890) was already a successful writer when in 1933 he published The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, inspired by the desperate plight of Armenian children he had seen working in a Syrian carpet factory. A bestseller and Werfel's masterpiece, the book brought the Armenian genocide to the world's attention for the first time but was burned by the Nazis. Werfel, an Austrian Jew, was forced to flee Europe, narrowly escaping with his life. He died in Los Angeles in 1945.