Frigyes Karinthy

Origins and early life

Frigyes Karinthy was born in Budapest on 25 June 1887, the son of József Karinthy, born József Kohn in 1846 at Pápa, whose parents, Lipót Kohn, a watchmaker, and Mária Glück, were respected members of the town's Jewish community; the family magyarized its name in 1874, and József, with his wife and daughters, joined the Lutheran church in March 1886, fifteen months before Frigyes was born — so that the writer was raised a Lutheran from birth, which this fiche states plainly, and enters this directory through his Jewish-born father and grandparents.

Work and career

A prodigy who published a novel at fifteen, he became the most beloved humorist Hungary has had: Így írtok ti, 'That's How You Write', of 1912, parodied every author of the day so exactly that the parodies outlived some of the originals, and Tanár úr kérem, 'Please, Sir!', of 1916, is the schoolboy's book that every Hungarian knows by heart. He was also a philosopher in disguise, a disciple of Swift whose Voyage to Faremido and Capillaria continued Gulliver's travels into the twentieth century, and the translator who gave Hungarian its Winnie-the-Pooh.

In a short story of 1929, Láncszemek, 'Chain-Links', he proposed as a game that any two people on earth could be connected through a chain of no more than five acquaintances — the idea that sociologists tested decades later and the world knows as six degrees of separation. In 1936 a brain tumor was removed by the Swedish surgeon Olivecrona while Karinthy lay conscious, and his account of it, A Journey Round My Skull, is one of the first and finest books written by a patient about his own illness. He died of a stroke at Siófok, on Lake Balaton, on 29 August 1938.