SOURCE: "Mocking a Mock Biography: Steven Millhauser's Edwin Mullhouse and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus," in Neverending Stories: Toward a Critical Narratology, edited by Ann Fehn, Ingeborg Hoesterey, and Maria Tatar, Princeton University Press, 1994, pp. 62-9.

[Below, Rieckmann uses Edwin Mullhouse and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus to examine the literary role of the mock biography.]

When Steven Millhauser's first novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer (1943–1954), by Jeffrey Cartwright was published in 1972, several reviewers remarked on its Nabokovian qualities and pointed to Pale Fire as the most likely model for Millhauser's mock-biography. The very title of Millhauser's novel, however, seems to point to another possible model: Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend. In fact, a comparison of these two fictional witness biographies leads this reader to conclude that Millhauser's novel, in some of...