Canetti, Elias (1905-1994), a Bulgarian-born author, won the 1981 Nobel Prize for literature. He became best known for writings that explore the psychology of crowds and the relationship of the individual in conflict with society.
Canetti was a novelist and dramatist, but his most famous work is the nonfiction Crowds and Power (1960). It deals with the psychology of crowds and the individual’s terror of freedom and death. He wrote three plays dealing with the same theme—The Wedding (1932), Comedy of Vanity (1950), and Life-Term (1964).
Canetti’s most famous novel is Auto-da-Fé (1935), also translated as The Tower of Babel. The book was intended to be the first in a series of eight novels dealing with mentally ill individuals obsessed by a single idea. Canetti completed only this first volume, a searing study of the mental disintegration of a scholar. Canetti wrote an acclaimed study of Czech writer Franz Kafka called Kafka’s Other Trial (1969). Excerpts from Canetti’s notebooks were collected in The Secret Heart of the Clock: Notes, Aphorisms, Fragments 1973-1985 (published in 1987).
Canetti was born on July 25, 1905, in Ruse, Bulgaria. He lived in several western European countries as a child, studying in England, Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. He earned a doctor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Vienna in 1929. Canetti settled in England in 1939. He identified himself with German culture and wrote in German. He wrote three volumes of autobiography, The Tongue Set Free (1977), The Torch in the Ear (1980), and Party in the Blitz: The English Years (published in 2005, after his death). Canetti died on Aug. 14, 1994.
