Sándor Petöfi

Though he died very young, Petôfi is the best nown Hungarian poet and is something of a national institution. He was born as the son of butcher István Petrovics and Mária Hrúz, a Slovak maid, in the Great Hungarian plains. As a young man, he became an actor and joined several theater companies but was not successful in this job and stayed quite poor. His fame began to rise when he started to publish his poems in Pest (now Budapest) newspapers. They became an immediate success due to their fresh and seemingly "simple" tone. His life's legend became even more romantic when he fell in love with a rich girl, Júlia Szendrey, and married her in 1847 in spite of her parents' disapproval. When the 1848 revolution broke out, Petôfi was enthusiastic about it and wrote a series of still well-known revolutionary poems. But his enthusiasm was not taken seriously politically. So he joined the army fighting against the Hapsburg rule and he disappeared (and probably died) in the lost Segesvár battle in 1849.