Early years Karl Daniel Adolf Douai was born in
Altenburg,
Thuringia, on February 22, 1819, to Carl Eduard and Eleanora Douai. The Douai family was of
French extraction, having fled to
Dresden after the fall of the
French Revolution. Douai's family was poor and he went to work at the age of 8. He worked variously in his boyhood years as a
newsboy, as an assistant to his father in teaching
peasant children, as a
crocheter of home manufactured wollen shawls, among other small jobs. Douai was poorly nourished as a child and short of stature, standing just tall at age 19. moved to
New Braunfels, Texas, in 1851. There he helped to raise funds to launch the
Neue Braunfelser Zeitung, a publication edited by his friend
Ferdinand Lindheimer, on November 12, 1852. Douai also attempted to establish another school, but the efforts of the
free-thinker Douai were impeded by a local
Catholic priest, who spoke out against the schoolmaster, prompting parents to withdraw their children from his school. Douai subsequently fell ill with
cholera, resulting in the termination of the school. In the fall of 1877 there was a short-lived plan for Douai to serve as English-language translator of
Das Kapital, the magnum opus of
Karl Marx first published in 1867. In January 1878, the
German-language socialist daily newspaper the
New Yorker Volkszeitung (New York People's News) was established, and Douai began to write extensively for the publication. It was there that Douai gained his greatest public fame as a journalist and publicist.
Death and legacy On January 21, 1888, Douai died in
Brooklyn, New York, after having suffered chronic "throat trouble." He was cremated and a public memorial was held January 23 at the Brooklyn Labor Lyceum. An unpublished typescript of an English translation of Adolph Douai's autobiography resides at the
San Antonio Public Library. ==References==