Europe That Was
Tales of Europe, before and after the war, when lives could change in an instant
Fleeing the Cuban revolution, a businessman’s return to England is blocked by the secret police of General Franco. In Hungary, a peasant treasures a barrel of wine as a symbol of the world she lost during the war. At a Romanian ball, in the frenzied years that followed the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a British traveler finds himself challenged to a duel. And in England, an American pilot stumbles into an auction and discovers that the Greek bowl in his hands may be worth far more than he is willing to pay.
From country to country, Geoffrey Household takes us through the back alleys and open fields of the continent he knows so well, and finds that there is a beautiful madness in the European spirit that no war can kill.
Geoffrey Household
Geoffrey Household (1900–1988) was born in England. In 1922 he earned a bachelor of arts degree in English literature from the University of Oxford. After graduation, he worked at a bank in Romania before moving to Spain in 1926 and selling bananas as a marketing manager for the United Fruit Company.
In 1929 Household moved to the United States, where he wrote children’s encyclopedia content and children’s radio plays for CBS. From 1933 to 1939, he traveled internationally as a printer’s-ink sales rep. During World War II, he served as an intelligence officer for the British army, with posts in Romania, Greece, Syria, Lebanon, and Persia. After the war, he returned to England and wrote full time until his death. He married twice, the second time in 1942 to Ilona Zsoldos-Gutmán, with whom he had three children, a son and two daughters.
Household began writing in the 1920s and sold his first story to the Atlantic Monthly in 1936. His first novel, The Terror of Villadonga, was published during the same year. His first short story collection, The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories, appeared in 1938. Altogether, Household wrote twenty-eight novels, including four for young adults; seven short story collections; and a volume of autobiography, Against the Wind (1958). Most of his novels are thrillers, and he is best known for Rogue Male (1939), which was filmed as Man Hunt in 1941 and as a TV movie under the novel’s original title in 1976.
