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Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art. A Biography
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About Thomas Mann: Life As A Work Of Art. A Biography
Product Description This vivid, sometimes tragic, and often humorous literary biography brings to life as never before the extraordinary talent and complex person who was Thomas Mann. Engrossing vignettes enable us to enter Mann's life and work from unique angles. We meet the difficult, even unsavory private man: hypochondriac and nervous, narcissistic and vainglorious, isolated and greedy for love, shy and often ungenerous. But we are also introduced to a man who lived an eventful life, was capable of great kindness, loved dogs, doted on his daughters, and listened to Jack Benny. We experience Mann's tragedy as the quintessential German forced by the rise of National Socialism first into inner exile and then into real exile in Switzerland, Princeton, and California. His letters from this time reveal the torment that exile represented for a writer whose work, indeed whose very self, was inextricably bound up with the German language. The book provides fresh and sometimes startling insights into both famous and little-known episodes in Mann's life and into his writing--the only realm in which he ever felt free. It shows how love, death, religion, and politics were not merely themes in Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and other works, but were woven into the fabric of his existence and preoccupied him unrelentingly. It also teases out what is known about what Mann considered his celibate homoeroticism and what others have labeled closeted homosexuality. In particular, we learn about his affection for the young man who inspired the character of Tadzio in Death in Venice. And, against the unfocused accusations of anti-Semitism that have been leveled at Mann, the book examines in human detail his relationships with Jewish writers, friends, and family members. This is the richest available portrait of Thomas Mann as man and writer--the place to start for anyone wanting to know anything about his life, work, or times. From Publishers Weekly More than any other modernist writer, Thomas Mann (1875-1955) has remained something of a mystery. Biographers have concluded from his writings that he was an anti-Semite, a closet homosexual, a proto-fascist and an authoritarian father. In exhaustive detail, renowned Mann scholar Kurzke offers what may easily become the definitive biography of the great writer. Drawing deeply on letters, journals, diaries and essays, he engages in close readings of all of Mann's writings to demonstrate the ways the writer's life so intimately informs his art and the ways that his art informs his life. Kurzke reads the essay "Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man," for example, to show how Mann's resistance to WWI nevertheless convinced him of the political power of art. Kurzke's Mann emerges as a celibate homoerotic writer who sublimated erotic desires and political questions into his art. Above all, Kurzke's biography proclaims, Mann ambitiously and tirelessly worked at his art ("He exists not for the sake of living but for the sake of writing") as he became an aesthete and man of letters. Kurzke's narrative is an unusual one that moves from past tense to present, from Mann's childhood to his later years, drawing on his writings blended with Kurzke's own interpretations. This style won't please everyone (and this is probably not for those looking for an introduction to Mann), but his portrait overcomes the theoretical tendencies of some recent Mann biographies (such as Anthony Heilbut's Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature) to offer a balanced, if sometimes hagiographic, study of Mann. 40 b&w photos. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Thomas Mann was one of the great humanist authors of the past century, the Nobel prize-winning architect of such beloved works as Death in Venice, Buddenbrooks, and The Magic Mountain, a naturalized American, a citizen of the world, and the quintessence of German genius. He was also a closeted homosexual who scheduled the release of his diaries to occur
