![]() The biographer's focus, however, is not on Mann's inner life, which he leaves nearly as opaque as he finds it, but rather on his accomplishments as a public figure. ![]() ![]() Hayman makes efficient use of these journals to convincingly reinterpret much of Mann's life and work in light of his sexual secret, arguing that Death in Venice, for example (in which an aging writer becomes obsessed with a boy), is fundamentally autobiographical. While maintaining a veneer of bourgeois propriety, Mann (18751955) experienced a lifelong, seemingly unconsummated passion for young men about which he wrote freely in diaries kept sealed until several decades after his death. ![]() Veteran biographer Hayman (Tennessee Williams, 1994, etc.) painstakingly traces the great German novelist's progress from anatomist of fin-de-siƤcle decadence to august personification of his nation's conscience. ![]()
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