Cursed Legacy: The Tragic Life of Klaus Mann (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780300218008)

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.

Author: Frederic Spotts
ISBN-10: 0300218001
ISBN-13: 9780300218008
Publisher: Yale University Press
Language: English
Published: 04/26/2016
Pages: 352
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.60lbs
Size: 9.40h x 6.40w x 1.30d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 01/25/2016