Between Heaven and Earth

FRANZ VIKTOR WERFEL (10 September 1890 - 26 August 1945) was an Austrian-Bohemian novelist, playwright, and poet whose career spanned both World Wars and the Interwar period. He is primarily known as the author of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933), a novel based on events during the 1915 Armenian Genocide, and The Song of Bernadette (1941), a novel about the life and visions of the French Catholic saint Bernadette Soubirous, which was made into a Hollywood film of the same name.
Born in Prague into a wealthy Jewish family, he was raised by his Czech Catholic governess, Barbara Šimůnková, who often took him to mass in Prague's main cathedral. He was educated at a Catholic school run by the Piarists, a teaching order that allowed for a rabbi to instruct Jewish students. This, along with his governess's influence, gave him an early interest (and expertise) in Catholicism.
He began writing at an early age and published his first book of poems, Der Weltfreund, in 1911. In 1924, "Verdi—Roman der Oper" (Novel of the Opera) established his reputation as a novelist, and in 1926 he was awarded the Grillparzer Prize by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. By the end of the decade, he had become one of the most important and established writers in German and Austrian literature.
He served in World War I, then lived and wrote in Vienna until driven out by the Nazi occupation of Austria. He escaped to the United States after the fall of France in 1940.
He died in Los Angeles in 1945 at the age of 54 and was interred there in the Rosedale Cemetery. His body was returned to Vienna in 1975 for reburial in the Zentralfriedhof.