Born November 18: Klaus Mann

As much as Klaus tried to make a name for himself with novels (Mephisto), memoirs (Turning Point), and plays (Anja and Esther), he could never escape the Mann legacy. Andrea Weiss unravels the twisted, riveting family story in her dual biography, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story [Kindle], highlighting their mainly queer circle of friends: Gide, Isherwood, Cocteau, Brecht, McCullers, and Auden, whom Erika married for citizenship. Klaus was far quicker than his father to grasp the evil of the Nazi ascent and he left Germany for Paris in 1933 when he was 26. He was granted Czech citizenship and came to America in 1936, the year of Mephisto, dividing his time between Princeton and New York. The following year he met his partner, Thomas Quinn Curtiss, who would become a critic for the IHT and Variety and wrote the screenplay for The Iceman Cometh. Klaus wrote one more novel, Der Vulken, about German exiles during WWII, published in 1939; his autobiography; and one nonfiction work Andre Gide and the Crisis of Modern Thought. As Colm Tóibín says, Klaus "was fluid and generous and flighty. He kept nothing in reserve, and this, despite his obvious literary talent, or maybe because of it, made him melancholy...instead of writing about death as his father did obsessively, he allowed the aura of death to enter his own spirit." He was also addicted to heroin. He killed himself with an overdose of pills, in Cannes, in 1949. Curtiss lived until 2000.