SOURCE: An obituary in The New York Times, August 19, 1994, p. A25.

[In the following, Grimes briefly traces Canetti's life and career.]

Elias Canetti, a novelist, playwright and cultural historian who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, died on Saturday in Zurich. He was 89 and had homes in London and Zurich.

On Wednesday, he was buried next to James Joyce.

Mr. Canetti, a Bulgarian who wrote in German, spent much of his creative life analyzing the individual and the social and political forces that weighed against him in the 20th century. He first wrote on the subject in Crowds and Power, published in 1935, just two years after Hitler came to power. Mr. Canetti returned to the theme in his old age in a multi-volume autobiography that traces his, and 20th-century Europe's, artistic and intellectual development.

Mr. Canetti was born to a family of Sephardic Jews in the port...