Miroslav Krleza (1893-1981) is considered one of the most important Central European authors of the twentieth century. In his career he was a poet, playwright, screenwriter, novelist, essaying, journalist, and travel writer. He also suffered condemnation as a leftist and a practitioner of modernism, and his books were proscribed in the 1930s. The first two books of the trilogy The Banquet in Blitva were written in the thirties; their comments on political, psychological, artistic, and ethical issues earned him the enmity of Yugoslavia's increasingly fascist government. He did not write and publish the third book in the trilogy until 1962.