De Hartog, Jan, 1914-2002

Jan de Hartog was born in Haarlem, Netherlands on April 22, 1914. His father, Arnold Hendrik, was a theologian; his mother, Lucretia Meijjes de Hartog, a scholar of medieval mysticism. He attended Amsterdam Naval College, and worked as a sailor, war correspondent and naval inspector before achieving success as an author and playwright.

Although de Hartog published five detective novels under the pseudonym F. R. Eckmar in the 1930's, his first noteworthy work was the novel Holland's Glorie (1940). Published in Dutch 10 days before the outbreak of the Second World War, the work sold over one million copies and was regarded as an essential expression of Dutch identity in wartime. The book made him a public figure in the Netherlands, and he used this platform to speak out against German occupation. In early 1942, de Hartog was forced to go into hiding and eventually fled the Netherlands under threat of arrest. After a lengthy journey across Western Europe, he arrived in England in July, 1943.

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