An essay of mine appeared in a volume on Thomas Mann’s Los Angeles

Thomas Mann’s Los Angeles is a gorgeous volume put together by the Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades. A huge group of writers explores various contemporaries of Mann’s 1940s Los Angeles. Texts from luminaries like Helmut Anheier, Sylvia Asmus, Tobias Boes, Anthony Caldwell, Heinrich Detering, Jaimey Fisher, Claudia Gordon, Jan-Christopher Horak, Noah Isenberg, David Jenemann, David Kim, Alexis Landau, Kaltërina Latifi, Irmela von der Lühe, Lilian Pfaff, Andreas Platthaus, Donna Rifkind, Alex Ross, and Michaela Ullmann, join rare archival materials. I myself got to write about the novelist Franz Werfel, his unusual path to LA, his charmed life there, and his at times contentious relationship to the Manns.