In November 1940, the small New York publishing house Howell, Soskin & Co. published Oskar Maria Graf’s book The Life of My Mother. Graf had already had plans for a book called “Geschichten von meiner Mutter” (“Tales of My Mother”) in the 1920s. But only in 1937 in exile in Czechoslovakia, three years after the death of his mother Therese, did he begin to write intensively. In doing preparatory research for the book he corresponded during his period in exile with his elder sister Resl and asked her for detailed information on their family. Nevertheless, given the fact that he lived so far from home, Graf’s principle work on his homeland and his family was produced mostly from memory.

His work was interrupted by his emigration to New York in 1938. Graf submitted the first part of his work that he finished in Brno to a literary competition of the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, which promised publication by an American publishing company. After his hopes of winning the prize were shattered, he was able to finish his book during a two-month fellowship in the Yaddo artists’ colony in July 1940.

The novel about the simple life of his mother, which stood in contrast to the Nazi blood-and-soil literature, remained for Graf throughout his life the book with which he could best identify. Despite a widely positive reception in the American press, commercial success remained elusive. The first German language edition was published in 1946 by the Kurt Desch Verlag in Munich.