The Devil: A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience

Ferenc Molnar (1878-1952), originally Ferenc Neumann, was a Hungarian dramatist and novelist. His Americanized name was Franz Molnar. He emigrated to the United States to escape the Nazi persecution of Hungarian Jews during World War II. As a novelist, Molnar is remembered principally for The Paul Street Boys, the story of two rival gangs of youths in Budapest. His most popular plays are Liliom (1909, tr. 1921), later adapted into the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical play Carousel (1945); The Guardsman (1910, tr. 1924), which served as the basis of the film of the same name (1931); The Swan (1920, tr. 1922) and The Good Fairy, which was adapted by Preston Sturges and filmed in 1935 with Margaret Sullavan, and subsequently turned into the 1947 Deanna Durbin vehicle, I'll Be Yours.