Six Early Stories

Winner of the 1998 PEN / Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize

“These early stories… are well worth reading. They are also a welcome addition to the body of Mann’s work in English. But they are something more. They remind us of what has been lost in the dissolution and passing of modernism. The boldness, daring and risk-taking in both formal, technical matters and in explicit, thematic explorations remain as admirable today as they were a century ago.”
— Steven Marcus, The New York Times Book Review, 9-21-1997

American readers will recall the German, Nobel Prize-winner Thomas Mann’s Stories of Three Decades (1936), which purposely excluded several early tales that the English translator found “tentative and awkward efforts.” As this volume’s editor, Burton Pike, notes, however, “Times and interests change; in 1936 Thomas Mann, in exile from Nazi Germany, was celebrated as a leading spokesman for the threatened humanistic values of Western civilization.” Mann’s early development seemed unimportant within that context, but such a judgment now seems arbitrary and wrong.