Carl Van Vechten · Public domain

Franz Werfel wrote The Forty Days of Musa Dagh in 1933, a novel dramatizing Armenian resistance during the 1915 genocide at a time when few Western writers addressed it at all. His later novel The Song of Bernadette, about a French Catholic visionary, became an improbable bestseller and a Hollywood film. A Czech-born Jewish writer working across the collapse of two world wars, he died in exile in Los Angeles in 1945.