Elias Canetti has been awarded the highest literary prizes and has been acclaimed by a small group of writers and scholars, but he has never been widely recognized by the reading public. His oeuvre includes outstanding writing in all major genres except poetry. At the time that Canetti was awarded the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature his one novel, Die Blendung (The Blinding, 1936; translated as Auto-da-Fé, 1946), was described as "a single fundamental metaphor for the threat exercised by the mass-man within ourselves"; his major theoretical work, Masse und Macht (1960; translated as Crowds and Power, 1962), an investigation of "the origin, composition and reaction patterns of mass movements," was called "a magisterial work by a polyhistor"; and his three plays, Komödie der Eitelkeit (published, 1950; performed, 1965; translated as Comedy of Vanity, 1983), Hochzeit (published, 1964; performed, 1965; translated as The Wedding, 1986), and Die Befristeten (published, 1964; performed, 1967; translated as Life-Terms, 1983), were celebrated for...