Melchior Lengyel was a Hungarian writer, dramatist, and screenwriter. His first play, THE GREAT PRINCE, was performed by the Thalia Company in 1907. In 1908 the Hungarian National Theatre performed his next drama, THE GRATEFUL POSTERITY, for which he received the Vojnits Award from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, given every year for the best play. TYPHOON, one of his plays, written in 1909, became a worldwide success and is still performed today. It was adapted to the screen in the United States in 1914. His articles were published in a wide range of Romanian magazines and newspapers. His story "The Miraculous Mandarin," a “pantomime grotesque,” came out in 1916. It is the story which inspired Béla Bartók, the famous Hungarian composer, to create in 1924 the ballet "The Miraculous Mandarin." After World War I, Lengyel went to the United States for a longer stay and published his experiences in 1922 in the book “American Journal.” In the 1920s, he was active in the film industry. For some time, he was story editor at May-Film in Berlin. In 1929-30, he was co-director of a Budapest theatre. In 1931, he was sent by the Hungarian newspaper "Pesti Napló" to London as its reporter. The story of his Utopian novel “The Happy City” came out in 1931; it was set in an American city that lay in the depths of a chasm created by the great Californian earthquake. He moved to Hollywood, California, in 1937 and became a screenwriter. Some of his stories became worldwide successes, such as “Ninotchka” (1939), for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Story, and “To Be or Not to Be” (1942). Lengyel returned to Europe in 1960 and settled down in Italy. In 1963, he received the Great Award of Rome for his literary works.
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