Description
Book SynopsisSon 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 autobiographiesamong them the first works in Germany to tackle gay issuesamidst 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
Trade Review“This absorbing biography draws a three-dimensional picture of the life of Klaus Mann, novelist, playwright, essayist, gay rights advocate, and seemingly the unluckiest man of letters in the years around WWII.”—
Publishers Weekly * Publishers Weekly *
“Spotts writes with humor and style, and a great admiration for his subject, which makes this biography valuable for literary historians but also quite accessible to the general reader.”—
Jewish Book Council * Jewish Book Council *
“Like all the finest biographers, Spotts brings history to life. He enables the reader to grasp the deep anxieties experienced by someone whose political convictions threatened his professional livelihood. . . . Above all he tells the heart-breaking story of an intellectual who stood up for his beliefs in dark times and paid a highly personal price for his politics.”—Anna Katharina Schaffner,
TLS -- Anna Katherina Schaffner * TLS *
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards in the Gay Memoir/Biography category. -- Lambda Literary Awards * Lambda Literary Foundation *
