Szabó, Pál

Born Apr. 5, 1893, in Biharugra; died Oct. 31, 1970, in Budapest. Hungarian writer.

Szabó was actively involved in the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 and suffered reprisals after its downfall. He was a member of the Party of Independence and 1848 and of the National Peasants’ Party; from 1939 to 1944 he was chairman of the latter party, which had ties with the Communist underground. From 1945 he was a deputy to the National Assembly.

Szabó’s first novel, People (1930), reflects the influence of Zs. Moricz. The novels Priests, Sundays (1933), Winter Crop (1940), and Wedding, Christening, Cradle (1942–43) depict peasant life; the novel The New Land (1953; Russian translation, 1955) and the novella This Side of the Tisza: Beyond the Danube (1960) deal with the social transformation of the countryside. Szabó is also the author of the four-volume autobiographical novel A Troubled Life (1954–58) and the prose collections The Whole World’s Like That (1958) and Under the Blue Sky (1963). He was awarded the A. József Prize in 1950 and the L. Kossuth Prize in 1951 and 1954.