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.

May was praised by men as diverse as Albert Einstein, Hermann Hesse, Albert Schweitzer, and Adolf Hitler. During World War II, Hitler sent 300,000 Winnetou novels to German soldiers as recommended tactical reading. Asked about early mentors, Einstein once commented: “My whole adolescence stood under his sign. Indeed, even today (May) has been dear to me in many a desperate hour.” Hermann Hesse wrote, “His is a whole new kind of work. I shall call it The Fiction of Wish Fulfillment.”

After May’s death in disgrace, German readers and loyalists took up a large subscription and created a Museum in his honor. That Museum does not, however, directly concern this fantasist’s unhappy biography. The Karl May Institute remains open today. It contains one of Germany’s foremost collections of genuine Plains Indian weaponry, art, and religious artifacts. Many have seen this as the highest praise, perhaps even a belated exoneration, of an imaginative man pilloried for his popular falsehoods.

Insofar as I know, of course, my Great-aunt Muriel, though a very real person, a churchgoer (Second Presbyterian), and an excellent cook by all reports, showed no interest in Singer Sargent and was never painted by him. Despite being born in Scotland, she spent so much of her salary on Mama’s drug bills, on her museum memberships and the National Geographic Society contributions, on her niece and then her great-nephews, Muriel never managed to feel quite rich enough for a return to the homeplace. Ethel discouraged her, having found Sunnyside’s former orchard a development of cottagers’ stuccoed houses. The stone homeplace was now a roadhouse; yellow placards advertising Kodak film were bolted to its front. I made up that other.

I’ve made so much of it up, you see. And then, having invented it, I transform the fiction into a curious pedigree. The story itself, the will to believe the best of my own—that becomes a credo. It’s an article of faith I find that I can live by.

John Ruskin actually told my actual great-grandpapa, who, in turn, told his mute and practical daughters, “To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion—all in one. The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to SEE something, and tell what it SAW in a plain way.”