Columbia essays on modern writers

This is a brief critical and biographical study in the distinguished series published by Columbia University Press.

Thomas Mann is a literary biography in the grand tradition by the acclaimed biographer of Proust, Sartre, and Kafka. Ronald Hayman offers the first complete portrait in English of the Nobel Prize-winning German novelist, and the first to draw on Mann's unexpurgated diaries. Thomas Mann, author of Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, Buddenbrooks, and Joseph and His Brothers, was a man with secrets. Ronald Hayman uncovers a brilliant writer's masks and brings to the fore the private man: his bisexuality, his obsession with "keeping up appearances," and the deep guilt feelings that plagued him for nearly fifty years. Hayman is the first biographer to show the extent to which Mann presented a sanitized self-portrait in his novels, stories, essays, photographs, public appearances, broadcasts, and articles. The world took Mann to be a self-controlled, elegant, dignified, supremely self-assured, rather aloof man. Wanting this image to survive his death, Mann incinerated most of his diaries and stipulated that the five thousand manuscript pages he had spared should be kept under seal for twenty years after his death. In reality, as these newly available diaries attest, Mann was subject to fits of nervous trembling, convulsive sobbing, and moments of sexual embarrassment. ("It can scarcely be impotence," he recorded in 1920. "How would it be if there were a young man at my disposal?") When his novels are reread in the perspective of the diaries, new meanings emerge, as do new interconnections between the problems of the characters and those of the author. As Hayman demonstrates in vivid and illuminating detail, Mann overcame literary inhibitions by speaking freely about his inner life through fictional characters apparently dissimilar to himself. As Mann once wrote to a friend, his trick was to find "novelistic forms and masks which can be displayed in public as a means of relaying my love, my hatred, my sympathy, my contempt, my pride, my scorn and the accusations I want to make.". Drawing on extensive research, including not only the as-yet-unpublished final volumes of Mann's diaries but also new interviews with Mann's children, Ronald Hayman moves behind Mann's public persona to bring forth startling reinterpretations of his novels, stories, and criticism, and to reveal an extraordinarily complex and often misunderstood genius.

Cassis reveals the private side of Greene - an opinionated, charming, articulate, controversial, complex person who was always at odds with conventional wisdom. The fifty-seven excerpts included in this book contain interviews with Greene as well as personal impressions, diary entries, articles, essays, literary pieces, and recollections by friends and contemporaries that span fifty years. Topics range from Greene's conversion to Catholicism to the writer's role in society. Contributors include such well-known writers as Anthony Burgess, John Mortimer, V. S. Pritchett, Kathleen Raine, A. L. Rowse, Israel Shenker, Kenneth Tynan, and Evelyn Waugh. In this collection of essays, A. F. Cassis sheds light on the mystery of Graham Greene. Novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, journalist, and playwright, Greene (1904-91) is considered one of the finest literary talents of the twentieth century. He combined his abilities as a wonderful storyteller and a master craftsman to bring respectability to the thriller genre, or what the author himself called "entertainments." In his writings, Greene expressed serious and controversial views on religious, political, and social issues.

A critical essay on the Nobel Prize-winning English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor.