Biography Essay

Elias Canetti's oeuvre is not extensive, but he wrote with style and wit in all major genres except poetry. When Canetti won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, Dr. Johannes Edfelt said in a speech at the ceremony that the laureate's major concern in his fiction and nonfiction has been to identify "the threat exercised by the 'massman' within ourselves." His one novel, Die Blendung (The Deception, 1946; translated as Auto-da-Fe, 1946), was identified by the Swedish Academy as a metaphor representing this major problem of modern man. The academy also praised his theoretical study Masse und Macht (1960; translated as Crowds and Power, 1962) as "a magisterial work" on the origin and nature of the crowd. Canetti was awarded the highest literary prizes but has enjoyed only a small and select readership of writers and scholars. Susan Sontag has quoted Canetti as saying that he set out to "grab...