Werfel was a novelist, playwright, and poet best known for The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933), a novel about the Armenian genocide.

His novel The Song of Bernadette (1941) was adapted into a 1943 Hollywood film.

• He was married to Alma Mahler, the widow of composer Gustav Mahler, from 1929 until his death.

• After the Nazi annexation of Austria, he fled to France, and in 1940 escaped over the Pyrenees on foot before reaching the United States, where he died in 1945.