The Mother - A Play in Three Acts

By Karel Capek

The Mother is an anti-war drama by the famed Czech writer of the early 20th century Karel Čapek.

The play is influenced by the Spanish civil war and illustrates the difficult relationship between the men that wanted to fight, and their mothers and loved ones who didn't want them to go and join the fight against fascism in order to defend democracy, freedom, and progress and to show the upset and suffering that comes with war.

This early work by Karel Čapek was originally published in 1938 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rimbault Press
• Release date: Apr 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781473392700

Karel Capek

Karel Capek was born in 1890 in Czechoslovakia. He was interested in visual art as a teenager and studied philosophy and aesthetics in Prague. During WWI he was exempt from military service because of spinal problems and became a journalist. He campaigned against the rise of communism and in the 1930s his writing became increasingly anti-fascist. He started writing fiction with his brother Josef, a successful painter, and went on to publish science-fiction novels, for which he is best known, as well as detective stories, plays and a singular book on gardening, The Gardener’s Year. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature several times and the Czech PEN Club created a literary award in his name. He died of pneumonia in 1938.