Elias Canetti

In one of the few contemporary studies of Nobel laureate Elias Canetti's life and works available in English, Thomas Falk clearly sets forth the author's contribution to twentieth-century thought and literature. Canetti is not only a creative writer but also a man of letters in the European tradition. The author of just one novel, Auto-da-Fe, and several plays, the erudite Canetti is prized most for his nonfiction writings: three volumes of autobiography, several. Collections of essays and aphorisms, and above all the exhaustive cross-cultural study of the psychodynamics of crowd behavior,…