This website is intended to focus and develop interest in the work of the Romanian novelist Petru Dumitriu (1924-2002). Some of his novels and essays have been translated from the French in which they were written into English, but the bulk of his work, particularly from his later years, is not translated. For those whose reading is limited to English, this website hopes to provide a fuller context for that reading.
I am a retired university lecturer in English and American literature, and so I claim no special expertise in this area, only a strong interest in and response to Dumitriu's work. I hope that those who have a fuller knowledge of this writer will contribute to this site, with material of their own, and corrections where necessary.
I can be reached at <martin@corners.me.uk>
Martin Corner, November 2013
Petru Dumitriu was born in Romania in 1924, at Bazias, a fishing village on the Danube, where his father, a former army officer, had an estate. His mother was Hungarian. During the Second World War he studied philosophy in Munich on a Humboldt scholarship. He returne to Romania after the royal coup of 1944, and, as a committed Communist, worked for the establishment of a Communist state in Romania. After the establishment of the People's Republic in 1947, he rose rapidly within the government elite to become head of the State Publishing House. His writing career had begun in the earlier 1940s; in the later part of that decade and into the 1950s, he developed as a writer of socialist realism, producing works such as Road without Dust (1949) and Nights in June (1953)