Sándor Márai was a Hungarian writer, poet, and journalist. He was born in the city of Kassa in Austria-Hungary, which is now Košice in Slovakia, to an old family of Saxon origin who had mixed with Magyars through the centuries. Through his father, he was a relative of the Ország-family. In his early years, Márai travelled to and lived in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Paris and briefly considered writing in German, but eventually chose his mother language, Hungarian, for his writings. He settled in Krisztinaváros, Budapest, in 1928. In the 1930s, he gained prominence with a precise and clear realist style. He was the first person to write reviews of the work of Kafka.