B. Traven is the most shadowy figure in the history of literature. We know only a few things about him for sure: that he wrote great novels like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Death Ship_; that he lived, at least for a time, and died in Mexico; and that he was a politically engaged writer who cared deeply about working and common people. We’re also pretty sure he was really one of three guys: Ret Marut, Traven Torsvan, or Hal Croves. But we can’t be sure which, or when, or how. Pretty intriguing, right? If you read Roberto Bolaño’s brilliant posthumous book_ 2666 last year, you are probably sensing shades of Benno Archimboldi, that book’s reclusive-German-writer-who-ended-up-in-Mexico. We’re willing to bet our first-edition copy of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre that Bolaño had B. Traven in mind when he created that character.

Whoever he really was, B. Traven was also a man who utterly shunned public attention. Though there are hordes of Traven theorists and stacks of books written about him, there is still no consensus on his real name, his birthplace, or his exact history. He was kind of like a ghost who wrote books.

A recent exhibition at the University of California, Riverside, shed more light on Traven and the Traven myth than ever had been done at one time before. We spoke with the exhibit’s curator, Heidi Hutchinson, to try and get a little more of a grasp on a writer who was so reclusive he made J.D. Salinger look like Jonathan Ames.

Vice: It seems that the most reliable theory on B. Traven’s true identity is that he was a German man named Ret Marut.

Heidi Hutchinson: The Ret Marut connection was first made by the East German researcher Rolf Recknagel in his 1966 book B. Traven: Beiträge zur Biographie (Contributions to a Biography). B. Traven had offered his first novel manuscript to the Büchergilde Gutenberg (Gutenberg Book Club), a subscription service for working-class Germans, in 1926. It was called Das Totenschiff (The Death Ship, 1926), and when the Büchergilde published it, it was an instant hit. Fellow revolutionaries who had known Ret Marut thought they recognized the style as his. Thus began the guessing game as to Traven’s identity. Recknagel pursued all of the old revolutionaries he could find and interviewed them, and the evidence at the time was enough for him to assume the Marut-Traven connection.

What are some other pieces of evidence for the Marut theory?

Researcher Karl Guthke, who traveled to Mexico and was able to visit the home and “archive” of B. Traven, cites an entry in B. Traven’s diary from July 26, 1924 that reads, “Marut is dead.” And in the days following Traven’s death, interviews with his widow, Rosa Elena Lujan, revealed that he had been “Ret Marut the Bavarian anarchist.”

What was the reason behind Traven’s obscuring of his true identity?

B. Traven always insisted that his life story was irrelevant. “Forget the man! Write about his works!” he would say. Traven readers believe that his life story is told (at least partially) in his books, and that is how B. Traven would have wanted it. E.R. Hagemann, an early B. Traven bibliographer (Checklist of the Work of B. Traven, 1959) called him “a man who has seemingly courted obscurity as another might court fame and notoriety, courted oblivion with an almost pathological intensity.” That sums it up!

When, as a founding member of the revolutionary government of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic (Räterepublik), he escaped certain execution in 1919, Ret Marut disappeared completely. Many believe that going to Mexico and assuming a new identity was his way of hiding behind his pseudonym. Indeed, Ret Marut was never caught and brought to justice, so the plan worked.

B. Traven the famous writer continued to be fanatically protective of his privacy, intentionally misleading his own readers and fans and those who would pursue his identity right to the end.

We know that Marut created the German political paper the Brick Burner. What was the writing like in that magazine?

Der Ziegelbrenner appeared in 40 issues, published at irregular intervals in Munich from 1917 to 1921. Subtitled “Criticism of Conditions and Loathsome Contemporaries,” it advertised itself as a cultural magazine, promising to bring, “in its irregularly published issues, essays on politics, commercial policy, the economy, political philosophy, and sociology, as well as aesthetic contributions, book reviews, theater reviews, and marginalia on controversies of the day.” The color of the cover and the magazine’s shape were those of a brick.

The tone is indeed satiric, and much of the criticism of the government and war effort is veiled or hidden within literary criticism or even poetry. Many criticisms of the government and its war effort managed to slip through the Munich censors. Bear in mind, World War I was raging all over Europe at this time. Censorship was strict; antiwar remarks were treason. Contemporaries wondered how, in a time of extreme material shortages, this anarchist periodical was still obtaining paper, giving rise to rumors that the Ziegelbrenner (as the editor-publisher called himself) was somehow connected to Kaiser Wilhelm II.

From 1919 to 1921, the Ziegelbrenner was on the run. You could no longer find an address to which to send letters to the editor or submit books for review. But Marut continued to publish whenever and wherever he could. Left-leaning bookstores and newsstands distributed his magazine until Ret Marut disappeared completely.