Peroutka was born to a Czech-German family in Prague in 1895. In 1913 he began his career as a journalist. After World War I, he became an editor-in-chief of a new newspaper Tribuna. Some articles published in Tribuna were later incorporated into books Z deníku žurnalistova and above all Jací jsme —in this book Peroutka mapped some myths about the Czech nation. In 1924 Peroutka passed from Tribuna to Lidové noviny and founded—thanks to Tomáš Masaryk's donation—the review Přítomnost. As a commentator he became very influential, standing on the position of the "Castle" and criticizing both communists and the Right represented by the national-democratic party of the first Czechoslovak prime ministerKarel Kramář. Peroutka expressed his political and other opinions also in several books: Boje o dnešek, Ano a ne, Budování státu and Osobnost, chaos a zlozvyky. As a representative of the Czech democratic tradition, Peroutka was arrested after the outbreak of World War II in 1939 and held in the Buchenwaldconcentration camp until 1945. He was offered freedom on the condition that he would serve as editor of a collaborationist Přítomnost; he refused and spent the whole of the war in Buchenwald. After liberation, Peroutka became an editor-in-chief of the newspaper Svobodné noviny and refounded his famous review, Přítomnost, under the name Dnešek. The journal became prominent through its critical stance on postwar violence committed on the German minority and hundreds of alleged collaborators. Nonetheless it also fit the general pattern of the time by hosting illusory views of the Communist party underestimating its totalitarian pretensions. Peroutka wrote two dramas: Oblak a valčík and Štastlivec Sula. Political articles Peroutka issued in the book Tak nebo tak. The 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'état caused Peroutka to decide to emigrate. In 1951 he became a director of the Czech division of the Radio Free Europe. The summa of his democratic life views was issued in 1959 as Democratic Manifesto. Peroutka also became a novelist in exile. He re-wrote his drama to the novel of the same name. The second novel, Pozdější život Panny, deals with the idea of the rescue of Joan of Arc. Peroutka's last drama was named Kdybych se ještě jednou narodil.
