Description

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Thomas Mann is widely acknowledged as the greatest German novelist of this century. His 1912 novella Death in Venice is the most frequently read example of Mann's early work.

Clayton Koelb's masterful translation improves upon its predecessors in two ways: it renders Mann into American (not British) English, and it remains true to Mann's original text without sacrificing fluency. For American readers, this is the translation of choice.



"Backgrounds and Contexts" includes Mann's working notes, which allow students to observe the author's creative process. The notes are available here for the first time in English.



Illuminating selections from Mann's essays and letters are also reprinted, as are period maps of Munich, Venice, and the Lido.



"Criticism" includes six essays—by Andre von Gronicka, Manfred Dierks, T. J. Reed, Dorrit Cohn, David Luke, and Robert Tobin—sure to stimulate classroom discussion.



A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

About the Author

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Thomas Mann, a member of a Hanseatic family with deep roots in Lübeck, was arguably Germany’s most famous twentieth-century writer. In 1929, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Clayton Koelb is Guy B. Johnson Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  He is the recipient of Guggenheim, Woodrow Wilson, and Danforth fellowships and the author of Thomas Mann’s "Goethe and Tolstoy," The Incredulous Reader: Literature and the Function of Disbelief, Kafka’s Rhetoric: The Passion of Reading, and Inventions of Reading: Rhetoric and the Literary Imagination.  He has also edited several volumes of critical readings.


Clayton Koelb is Guy B. Johnson Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  He is the recipient of Guggenheim, Woodrow Wilson, and Danforth fellowships and the author of Thomas Mann’s "Goethe and Tolstoy," The Incredulous Reader: Literature and the Function of Disbelief, Kafka’s Rhetoric: The Passion of Reading, and Inventions of Reading: Rhetoric and the Literary Imagination.  He has also edited several volumes of critical readings.