Mór Jókai

Móric Jókay de Ásva ([ˈmoːr ˈjoːkɒi], known as Mór Jókai; 18 February 1825 – 5 May 1904), outside Hungary also known as Maurus Jokai, was a Hungarian dramatist and novelist.

He was born in Komárom, in the Kingdom of Hungary (present-day Komárno in Slovakia). His father, József, was a member of the Ásva branch of the ancient Jókay family; his mother was a scion of the noble Pulays. The lad was timid and delicate, and therefore educated at home till his tenth year, when he was sent to Pozsony (today: Bratislava in Slovakia), subsequently completing his education at the Calvinist college at Pápa, where he first met Sándor Petőfi, Sándor Kozma, and several other young men who subsequently became famous.

After his father's death when Jókai was 12, his family had meant him to follow the law, his father's profession, and accordingly the youth, always singularly assiduous, plodded conscientiously through the usual curriculum at Kecskemét and Pest (part of what is now Budapest), and as a full-blown advocate succeeded in winning his first case.

The drudgery of a lawyer's office was uncongenial to the ardently poetical youth, and, encouraged by the encomiums pronounced by the Hungarian Academy upon his first play, Zsidó fiú (The Jewish Boy), he flitted, when barely twenty, to Pest in 1845 with an MS. romance in his pocket; he was introduced by Petőfi to the literary notabilities of the Hungarian capital, and the same year his first notable romance Hétköznapok (Working Days), appeared, first in the columns of the Pesti Divatlap, and subsequently, in 1846, in book form. Hétköznapok, despite its manifest crudities and extravagances, was instantly recognized by all the leading critics as a work of original genius, and in the following year Jókai was appointed the editor of Életképek, the leading Hungarian literary journal, and gathered round him all the rising talent of the country.

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