Elias Canetti

Elias Canetti was born in 1905 in Ruse, Bulgaria, into a Sephardic Jewish family of merchants. His first language was Ladino, and he grew up speaking Bulgarian, English, and French before adopting German, the language his parents used as their private tongue of intimacy, as his literary language. After his father's sudden death, his mother moved the family to Vienna, where Canetti was educated and where the intellectual culture of the city shaped his life's work. He studied chemistry at the University of Vienna but devoted himself to literature and the study of crowds and power, subjects that would preoccupy him for decades. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by Auto-da-Fé.