The Road to Serfdom (German: "Der Weg zur Knechtschaft") is a book written between 1940 and 1943 by Austrian-British economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek. Since its publication in 1944, "The Road to Serfdom" has been an influential and popular exposition of liberalism. It has been translated into more than 20 languages and sold over two million copies (as of 2010). The book was first published in Britain by Routledge in March 1944, during World War II, and was quite popular, leading Hayek to call it "that unobtainable book", also due in part to wartime paper rationing. It was published in the United States by the University of Chicago Press in September 1944 and achieved great popularity. At the arrangement of editor Max Eastman, the American magazine "Reader's Digest" published an abridged version in April 1945, enabling "The Road to Serfdom" to reach a wider non-academic audience.