Death in Venice and Other Stories.

MANN, Thomas.

Item Number: 67022

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925.

First edition in English preceding the British edition by three years of Mann’s classic novel. Octavo, original cloth, patterned endpapers. Signed by Thomas Mann on the half-title page. Translated from the German by Kenneth Burke. Near fine in the rare original dust jacket with some chipping to the head of the spine and rear panel. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. First editions are rare, especially so signed.

"Thomas Mann is one of the greatest and most widely read authors of the 20th century… An innovative stylist and synthesizer of the intellectual trends of his time, Mann exerted much influence on modern fiction not only in Germany but in Europe and in both Americas as well. His perceptiveness as an interpreter of Western cultural heritage and his skill as a cosmopolitan teacher of democratic and humanistic values earned him recognition as a 'mirror of his age' and a 'citizen of the world'… Among Mann's many well-written works of short fiction, "Death in Venice" (1928), a novella based on Mann's impressions during his stay in Venice, is the most famous… Typically for Mann, the novella deals with the problem of the unhappy, sick artist, Gustav von Aschenbach, who envies the healthy and 'normal' people of the bourgeois society" (Pribic, 262-3).