Cursed legacy : the tragic life of Klaus Mann / Frederic Spotts.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 312-327), filmography (p. 328), and index.

Introduction -- First writings 1906-24 -- First scandals 1924-28 -- First drugs 1929-32 -- Fleeing Hitler 1933 -- Homosexualities 1934-35 -- Lecturing to Americans 1936-37 -- Stalin's agent 1938-39 -- Farewell to Germany 1940-41 -- A new identity 1942 -- 'Misplaced' 1943 -- German problem children 1944-45 -- The shadow falls 1946-47 -- Todessehnsucht 1948 -- Death in Cannes 1949 -- Epilogue.

Son of the famous Thomas Mann, homosexual, drug-addicted, and forced to flee from his fatherland, the gifted writer Klaus Mann's comparatively short life was as artistically productive as it was devastatingly dislocated. Best-known today as the author of Mephisto, the literary enfant terrible of the Weimar era produced seven novels, a dozen plays, four biographies, and three autobiographies-among them the first works in Germany to tackle gay issues-amidst a prodigious artistic output. He was among the first to take up his pen against the Nazis, as a reward for which he was blacklisted and denounced as a dangerous half-Jew, his books burnt in public squares around Germany, and his citizenship revoked. Having served with the U.S. military in Italy, he was nevertheless undone by anti-Communist fanatics in Cold War-era America and Germany, dying in France (though not, as all other books contend, by his own hand) at age forty-two. Powerful, revealing, and compulsively readable, this first English-language biography of Klaus Mann charts the effects of reactionary politics on art and literature and tells the moving story of a supreme talent destroyed by personal circumstance and the seismic events of the twentieth century.