
Ivo Andric (1892-1975), Nobel Prize laureate for literature in 1961, is undoubtedly the most popular of all contemporary Yugoslav writers. Over the span of fifty-two years some 267 of his works have been published in thirty-three languages. Andric’s doctoral dissertation, The Development of Spiritual Life in Bosnia under the Influence of Turkish Rule (1924), never before translated into English, sheds important light on the author’s literary writings and must be taken into account in any current critical analysis of his work. Over his long and distinguished career as a diplomat and man of letters Andric never again so directly or discursively addressed, as a social historian, the impact of Turkish hegemony on the Bosnian people (1463–1878), a theme he returns to again and again in his novels. Although Andric’s fiction was embedded in history, scholars know very little of his actual readings in history and have no other comparable treatment of it from his own pen. This dissertation abounds with topics that Andric incorporated into his early stories and later novels, including a focus on the moral stresses and compromises within Bosnia’s four religious Catholic, Orthodox, Jew, and Muslim. Z. B. Juricic provides an extensive introduction describing the circumstances under which this work was written and situating it in Andric’s oeuvre. John F. Loud’s original bibliography drawn from this dissertation stands as the only comprehensive inventory of historical sources known to have been closely familiar to the author at this early stage in his development.
Author

Ivan "Ivo" Andrić (Cyrillic: Иво Андрић) was a Yugoslav and Bosnian novelist, short story writer and Nobel prizewinner. His writings deal mainly with life in his native Bosnia under the Ottoman Empire. His house in Travnik is now a Museum. His Belgrade flat on Andrićev Venac hosts the Museum of Ivo Andrić and the Ivo Andrić Foundation. After the Second World War, he spent most of his time in his Belgrade home, held ceremonial posts in the Communist government of Yugoslavia and was a Bosnia and Herzegovina parliamentarian. He was also a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. In 1961, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature "for the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from the history of his country". He donated the prize money to libraries in Bosnia and Herzegovina. His works include The Bridge on the Drina, Bosnian Chronicle (aka Chronicles of Travnik), and The Woman from Sarajevo. These were written during WW2 while he was living quietly in Belgrade and published in 1945. They are often referred to as the "Bosnian Trilogy" as they were published simultaneously and had been written in the same period. However, they're connected only thematically. Other works include Ex Ponto (1918), Unrest (Nemiri, '20), The Journey of Alija Đerzelez (Put Alije Đerzeleza, 1920), The Vizier's Elephant (Priča o vezirovom slonu, 1948; tr. 1962), The Damned Yard (Prokleta avlija, 1954), and Omer-Pasha Latas (Omerpaša Latas, released posthumously in 1977)