Michael Ende was born in Garmisch in Bavaria in November 1929 and died in August 1995. His father was the surrealist painter Edgar Ende, and the official Ende website points to that visionary, picture-making household as an early influence. He became one of the best-selling German authors of the postwar decades. The same site gives a figure of over 40 million books sold, in more than 50 languages.
His first big success was Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver (1960), a children's adventure that won the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 1961 and was followed by a sequel, Jim Button and the Wild 13. Children's fantasy was his best-known ground, but he also wrote poems, theatre pieces and books for adults. Across all of it he treated storytelling as a serious subject, and imagination as something a society can lose.
Momo, published in 1973, won the same youth literature prize in 1974. The Neverending Story followed in 1979 and received the Buxtehuder Bulle. Its English edition appeared in 1983, translated by Ralph Manheim and illustrated by Roswitha Quadflieg. The 1984 film adaptation covered only part of the book. Ende objected to it, and he and his German publisher went to court over it and lost, as the official site records.
Start with The Neverending Story. A boy named Bastian reads a book about Fantastica, a land threatened by the Nothing, and the reading pulls him into the story. It is his most ambitious novel and the one most readers already know by name. Momo is the natural second book, and Jim Button is the gentler choice for younger listeners.
