The Hotel Years gathers sixty-four pieces--never before translated into English--from 1919 to 1939, beginning in Vienna just at the end of the First War, and ending in Paris with the Second War about to begin. Joseph Roth was the outstanding journalist and commentator of the day. Roth needed journalism to survive; in his six-volume collected works in German, there are three of fiction and three of journalism. He published an article on average two or three times a week. After 1921, he wrote mostly for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung. They sent him on tours through Germany--the Inflation, the occupation, political assassinations, etc.--and abroad, to the USSR, Italy, Poland, Albania, etc., etc. The Hotel Years presents little sequences of feuilleton: on Hotels; Russia; Albania; Pains and Pleasures; Personalities; and the deteriorating international situation of the 1930s.