Hermann Broch was a novelist, playwright, mathematician, and engineer. He was born in Vienna in 1886; he came to the United States in 1938. The Sleepwalkers (1932) Broch's prose trilogy describes three stages in the disintegration of modern European society. The Death of Virgil (1945), whom Broch considered a prototype of the modern individual, depicts the last eighteen hours of the life of Virgil. Broch's vision of the immanence of death will probably be regarded as his most original contribution to human experience.
Broch was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (1941-42), a membership in the American Institute of Arts and Letters (1942), and a Rockefeller Fellowship for Philosophical and Psychological Research at Princeton (1942-44).
Broch died in 1951.
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