Melmoth the Wanderer empty. They follow Melmoth's tracks to the top of a cliff, and see his handkerchief on a crag below them. "Exchanging looks of silent and unutterable horror", they return home. Honoré de Balzac wrote a follow-up story ("Melmoth Reconciled") and considered Maturin's novel worthy of a place among Molière's "Don Juan", Goethe's "Faust" and Lord Byron's "Manfred" as one of the supreme icons of modern European literature. Oscar Wilde, during his travels after release from prison, called himself Sebastian Melmoth, deriving this pseudonym from the title character in his great-uncle's novel and from Saint Sebastian. Historian of English literature Walter
Sebastian Haffner considered as one of the most successful German authors in the history of the 19th and 20th century writing for a broad, nonacademic audience. He wrote most of his works in German, some of which have been translated into English, French, Spanish, Hebrew and other languages. The manuscript of "Defying Hitler", discovered posthumously by his son, Oliver Pretzel, is a memoir of the Nazis' rise to power, as witnessed by Haffner before he went into exile. Sebastian Haffner Raimund Pretzel (27 December 1907 – 2 January 1999), better known by his pseudonym Sebastian Haffner, was a German journalist and author.