Max Frisch
"I'm Not Stiller" started with a print-run that provided for sales of 3,000 in its first year, but thanks to strong and growing reader demand it later became the first book published by Suhrkamp to top one million copies. The next novel, "Homo Faber", was another best seller, with four million copies of the German language version produced by 1998. "The Fire Raisers" and "Andorra" are the most successful German language plays of all time, with respectively 250 and 230 productions up till 1996, according to an estimate made by the literary critic Volker Hage. The two plays, along with "Homo Faber" became curriculum favourites with schools in the German-speaking middle European countries. Apart from a few early works, most of Frisch's books and plays have been translated into around ten languages, while the most translated of all, "Homo Faber", has been translated into twenty-five languages.
Max Frisch
Interviewed in 1975, Frisch acknowledged that his literary career had not been marked by some "sudden breakthrough" (""...frappanten Durchbruch"") but that success had arrived, as he asserted, only very slowly. Nevertheless, even his earlier publications were not entirely without a certain success. In his 20s he was already having pieces published in various newspapers and journals. As a young writer he also had work accepted by an established publishing house, the Munich based , which already included a number of distinguished German-language authors on its lists. When he decided he no longer wished to have his work published in Nazi Germany he changed publishers, joining up with which had relocated their head office from Berlin to Zürich in response to the political changes in Germany. In 1950 Frisch switched publishers again, this time to the arguably more mainstream publishing house then being established in Frankfurt by Peter Suhrkamp. 
Frisch was still only in his early 30s when he turned to drama, and his stage work found ready acceptance at the Zürich Playhouse, at this time one of Europe's leading theatres, the quality and variety its work much enhanced by an influx of artistic talent since the mid-1930s from Germany. Frisch's early plays, performed at Zürich, were positively reviewed and won prizes. It was only in 1951, with "", that Frisch experienced his first stage-flop. The experience encouraged him to pay more attention to audiences outside his native Switzerland, notably in the new and rapidly developing Federal Republic of Germany, where the novel "I'm Not Stiller" succeeded commercially on a scale that till then had eluded Frisch, enabling him now to become a full-time professional writer.