Joseph Roth was a Austro-Hungarian journalist and novelist, best known for his family saga The Radetzky March (1932), about the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Roth grew up with his mother and her relatives; he never saw his father, who had disappeared before he was born. After secondary school, Roth moved to Lemberg to begin his university studies in 1913, before transferring to the University of Vienna in 1914 to study philosophy and German literature.