Thomas Mann’s Brush with Darkness

In 1950, a Briefly Noted reviewer in this magazine made short work of “The Thomas Mann Reader,” an anthology culled from the German novelist’s vast prose output: “The total impression created by this three-hundred-thousand-word monument is that Mann is a major writer, but perhaps not all that major.” A New Yorker subscriber in Los Angeles, residing at 1550 San Remo Drive, in Pacific Palisades, was annoyed. “Yes, I may well be a ‘major author,’ ” Thomas Mann wrote to a friend, “ ‘but not that major.’ ” The creator of “Tonio Kröger” and “Death in Venice” was at the summit of his fame, yet many younger critics dismissed him as a bourgeois relic, irrelevant in the age of bebop and the bomb. Another commentator numbered Mann among those “literary monoliths who have outlived their proper time.”