He was born in 1879 in Kolozsvár, the tenth child of a family of minor nobility who worked as civil servants. He graduated from the Reformed High School in Kolozsvár in 1899 and then continued his studies at the University of Budapest, majoring in Hungarian and French. During his university years, he delved deeply into Finno-Ugric linguistics. After earning his teaching degree in Hungarian and French, he taught for a short time before moving to Paris on a scholarship.

Upon his return, he taught in Székesfehérvár, Nagyvárad, Székelyudvarhely, Sümeg, Ungvár, and Lőcse. During the 1910 teachers’ movement, he became embroiled in a heated debate with István Tisza, which led him to become involved with the literary circles of Nyugat and later Huszadik Század. He was a contributor to these publications for years, and his first short stories appeared in Nyugat.

He personally experienced the period of the Hungarian Soviet Republic and the proletarian dictatorship, which he considered alien and anti-national, and thus fled to the countryside. Since he saw that “the anti-national schemes of primarily Jewish arms dealers” were taking place in the country, he formed the opinion in his youth that “capitalism had shackled Hungary”, and he regarded all of this, along with socialism, as the result of Jewish activity.

In 1918, he completed his book The Swept-Away Village, which is set in Transylvania and Budapest and depicts the trends of the era that he considered destructive to Hungary. The book made him famous overnight. From the 1920s onward, anti-German sentiment was also evident in his works. Together with Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, he edited a newspaper titled Előörs, in which they wrote in a “racialist” tone. Their views on the dangers threatening the Hungarian people were not entirely identical, for while Bajcsy-Zsilinszky considered the Germans the greatest threat, Szabó identified the Jews as primary target of concern. However, his critical stance toward the Jewish community cannot be unequivocally categorized as extreme right-wing or vulgar anti-Semitic, as it is evident that he articulated equally condemnatory sentiments toward these groups as he did toward the Jewish community itself.

In the 1930s, he initially supported Gyula Gömbös’s national work plan, but later turned away from it and gradually came into conflict with the leaders of the Horthy era. In 1932, he wrote The Resurrection in Makucska and in 1934, The Legend of the Rope. He clearly rejected international socialism and communism, which he considered to be anti-national. Politically, he sympathized more with Mussolini’s fascism than with Hitler’s National Socialism; indeed, he condemned the German occupation and the terror of the Arrow Cross regime.

He died in 1945 at the age of sixty-five in Budapest, in the shelter of his apartment on Rákóczi Square. Death easily took his body, already weakened by starvation. His lyrical prose work, the autobiography titled My Lives, remained unfinished.

He was educated, well-informed, and spoke several European languages. He quickly distinguished himself through his studies, his writings on public affairs, and, as a writer, his linguistic power. He was a highly influential innovator of 20th-century Hungarian literary language.

His expressive style, his ability to create vivid imagery, and the conciseness of his message contribute to the vividness and dynamism of his writings. All the fashionable intellectual currents of the era leave their mark on his works, from positivism through the history of ideas to irrational philosophies. Among Hungarian literary traditions, his work is most deeply rooted in Romanticism; following in the footsteps of Endre Ady and Zsigmond Móricz, he extols Hungarian identity in the context of intellectual history. He did not become a proponent of national racial theory or racism.

His unspoken but genuine desire was for bourgeois emancipation. He aspired to reside as an autonomous, 20th-century Hungarian citizen. With the exception of a brief period at the turn of the 20th century, this was not a possibility in Hungary. This is the primary reason for his intellectual isolation and seclusion from the mid-1930s onward. This phenomenon can be attributed, in part, to his relative marginalization in literary education and literary propaganda from 1945 to 1990.

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