Donald A. Prater Livres

Donald Prater nous livre ici la biographie majeure de Stefan Zweig. L'auteur a eu accès à de très nombreux documents inédits et essentiels : correspondances, témoignages, archives... C'est un portrait profond et attachant, à l'image du grand écrivain autrichien - auteur notamment de La Confusion des sentiments, de Vingt-quatre heures de la vie d'une femme... - qui s'est suicidé avec son épouse en 1942, face à l'horreur nazie. Le Zweig que nous rencontrons est comme un ami ou un frère : généreux, tourmenté, souvent contradictoire ; humain. Cette biographie est aussi un formidable tableau de l'Europe cosmopolite de la Belle Epoque et de l'entre-deux-guerres. Une magistrale évocation à la croisée de deux siècles et de dix cultures.

A celebrated biography of probably the greatest lyric poet of this century. Prater draws on recent documentary evidence to provide a compelling account of this most complex of lives.

The author of several of the major classics of modern European fiction, including Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, Buddenbrooks, and The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Thomas Mann was also a staunch opponent of Nazism (which eventually drove him into exile) and a towering presence in German and European intellectual life for more than fifty years. Celebrated biographer Donald Prater traces Mann's life and work from his upbringing in Lubeck, through his years in Munich, his exile in the United States, and his last years in Switzerland. He analyses the image and reality of a man regarded both as arrogant and aloof and as a vulnerable and sensitive witness to the traumatic upheavals of the twentieth century. Particular attention is devoted to Mann's political thinking and his role in the rise and fall of Hitlerism. In Mann's development from nationalistic conservatism to a vigorous humanist anti-Nazism