Thomas Mann
1 book analyzed
Biography
Thomas Mann (1875-1955) was Germany's most celebrated novelist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. He wrote Death in Venice at age thirty-six, drawing directly on a trip to Venice in May 1911 during which he stayed at the Hotel des Bains on the Lido, observed a Polish boy named Wladyslaw Moes on the beach, and learned of a cholera outbreak the authorities were suppressing. Mann was himself a man of extreme personal discipline — meticulous daily routines, formal dress, public propriety — who privately struggled with homoerotic desires he never fully acted upon. The novella is, among many other things, an act of controlled self-exposure: Mann gave Aschenbach his own discipline, his own suppressions, and then imagined what would happen if the structure broke.