Over the next thirty years, drawing mainly from atlases, ethnological studies, and travelers’ journals, May published a spate of similar books, the best and most popular of which was the trilogy “Winnetou” (1893–1910). Set in the plains and mountains of the West and Southwest at about the time of the Civil War, it chronicles the deeds of a knightly band of heroic “men of the West” surrounding a young German adventurer, “Old Shatterhand” and his blood brother, Winnetou, the noble chief of the Mescalero Apaches. In this band were “Old Firehand,” “Old Surehand,” “Sharpeye,” “Old Wabble,” and Sam Hawkens. Themselves men of untarnished integrity and valor, they are nevertheless constantly being vilified, double-crossed and ambushed by an assortment of white scoundrels and misled Indians. And yet, there are no truly bad Indians in “Winnetou,” only angry and naive victims of the whites’ cruelty and greed. May compared Winnetou to a “deer that … (now) sees and hears with its soul” and contrasted the Indian with white men who are as “docile domestic animals.” Upon his death, Winnetou acknowledges Christ and requests that an “Ave Maria” be sung for him. Despite the gross lack of realism and moralizing sentimentality, these stories still abound in hair-raising surprises, outrageous comedy, unforgettable characters.

May’s years of anonymous toil as a hack writer were followed by two decades of success which made him a bestselling writer in Germany, particularly among the youth. Responding in part to demands from his growing public, May gradually began to pretend that he was, in fact, characters from his books. He had photographs taken of himself in Western garb and Oriental costume which he signed and sent to his fans. But wealth and fame had the disadvantage of making his life a matter of public curiosity and malice. This led, in 1904, to the scandalous revelation of his early years of crime and imprisonment and to the even more damaging discovery that he had never been to the United States at all (much less experienced the adventures narrated in his Westerns).

The pose had been a relatively harmless fraud. But in light of his criminal record it appeared yet another episode of a long history of swindle and moral hypocrisy. Humiliated by these disclosures and his own attempts at denial, May made a three-month tour of America in 1908 but traveled no further West than Buffalo, New York. In his last years, he wrote two justifications of his life which some critics consider his finest literary works. Abused in the press and defeated in the court in his suits for defamation of character, May died a broken man.

Until recently Karl May has been considered beneath contempt by most literary critics and historians. At best he was recognized as a master of juvenile adventure stories and a popular writer of escapist fiction for the common man. His novels were, for the most part, hastily written, uneven, and inconsistent; his stories, tangles of unlikely coincidence and improbable action…. Indeed the renewed interest in May’s work is principally an outgrowth of contemporary interest in their symbolic element, their joyous outwardness, their religiose nearly dream-like quality.