Karl May's My Life and My Efforts is both autobiography and self-justification, a book shaped by controversy, censorship, lawsuits, and later revisions that often altered or removed major passages. Its opening pages confront the uneasy boundary between fact and invention, as May defends the truth of his life while readers and critics question the reliability of his memories, his family legends, and even the events he claims as his own. Against school records, church documents, and disputed travel stories, the book reveals a writer determined to turn ancestry, hardship, and fantasy into a personal myth. This volume also traces May's career from his early struggles to his rise as one of the most popular German authors of adventure fiction, especially through Winnetou and the Oriental cycle. It follows his publishing triumphs, marriages, legal battles, travels, and growing public legend, while also noting the darker gaps in his past and the controversy surrounding his later, more symbolic and pacifist works. Framed by the allegorical Fable of Sitara, the autobiography presents literature as a spiritual mission: to lift humanity from a low, material world toward moral nobility through the imagined voices of Kara Ben Nemsi and Old Shatterhand. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.