Cursed Legacy: The Tragic Life of Klaus Mann

Synopsis

Son of the famous Thomas Mann, homosexual, drug-addicted, and forced to flee from his fatherland, the gifted writer Klaus Mann’s comparatively short life was as artistically productive as it was devastatingly dislocated. Best-known today as the author of Mephisto, the literary enfant terrible of the Weimar era produced seven novels, a dozen plays, four biographies, and three autobiographies—among them the first works in Germany to tackle gay issues—amidst a prodigious artistic output. He was among the first to take up his pen against the Nazis, as a reward for which he was blacklisted and denounced as a dangerous half-Jew, his books burnt in public squares around Germany, and his citizenship revoked. Having served with the U.S. military in Italy, he was nevertheless undone by anti-Communist fanatics in Cold War-era America and Germany, dying in France (though not, as all other books contend, by his own hand) at age forty-two. Powerful, revealing, and compulsively readable, this first English-language biography of Klaus Mann charts the effects of reactionary politics on art and literature and tells the moving story of a supreme talent destroyed by personal circumstance and the seismic events of the twentieth century.

Copyright:

2016

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9780300220971

Related ISBNs:

9780300218008

Publisher:

Yale University Press

Date of Addition:

07/19/19

Copyrighted By:

Frederic Spotts

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Nonfiction, Biographies and Memoirs, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.