Mor Jokai: the man whose wikipedia entry stands, gloriously, above the rest...

The drudgery of a lawyer's office was uncongenial to the ardently poetical youth, and, encouraged by the encomiums pronounced by the Hungarian Academy upon his first play...he flitted...to Pest with a romance in his pocket...despite its manifest crudities and extravagances, [it] was instantly recognized by all the leading critics as a work of original genius...

He married the great tragic actress...Now, as ever, he was a moderate Liberal, setting his face steadily against all excesses; but, carried away by the Hungarian triumphs of April and May 1849, he supported Kossuth's fatal blunder of deposing the Habsburg dynasty...he intended to commit suicide to avoid imprisonment, but was spared by the arrival of his wife, with whom he made a difficult journey on foot through Russian lines to Pest.

This was perhaps the most glorious period of his existence, for during it he devoted himself to the rehabilitation of the proscribed and humiliated Magyar language...

Jókai was an arch-romantic, with an almost Oriental imagination, and humour of the purest, rarest description. If one can imagine a combination, in almost equal parts, of Walter Scott, William Beckford, Dumas père, and Charles Dickens, together with a strong hint of Hungarian patriotism, one may perhaps form a fair idea of the character of the work of this great Hungarian romancer.

Jókai was extremely prolific. It was to literature that he continued to devote most of his time, and his productiveness after 1870 was stupendous, amounting to some hundreds of volumes. Stranger still, none of this work is slipshod, and the best of it deserves to endure. Amongst the finest of his later works may be mentioned the unique and incomparable Az arany ember (A Man of Gold)...He was also an amateur chess player...