Cursed Legacy: The Tragic Life of Klaus Mann

by Frederic Spotts

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300218001
• ISBN13: 9780300218008
• Release Date: April 2016
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.4" x 9.4"