Word: manns
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...THOMAS MANN: THE MAKING OF AN ARTIST, 1875-1911 by Richard Winston Knopf; 325 pages...
...hubris to advance a world view, to rewrite the Bible in his Joseph novels, to devise the great metaphor of Europe as a sanatorium full of the walking wounded in The Magic Mountain. Was Thomas Mann ever unsure of himself, writing his quota of pages day after day in the comfort of a Germany he was later to renounce for exile in California? Was he ever young...
...answer seems to be yes-just barely-on the basis of the rich evidence assembled by Richard Winston, editor of Letters of Thomas Mann and a distinguished translator, who died at 62 in 1979 after reaching only the 36th year in Mann's life...
...time he was 23, Mann had already struck his friends as "grave." The brief period he spent as editorial assistant on the satirical magazine Simplicissimus only seemed to increase his specific gravity. The summers he spent in Italy seemed to make him even more German. To go south in a Mann story became a symbol for going to the devil...
Once he began writing in earnest, Mann managed his career as though it were the family business. Friends about to review his first novel, Buddenbrooks, a story of materialistic decline and youthful awareness, received detailed instructions from the author, who was 26. Comparisons to Dickens and the "great Russians" were recommended. About himself, the noted ironist was seldom ironical...