Interlude I: Joseph in Egypt (1938)

Abstract

On February 28, 1938, almost exactly a week after Thomas Mann’s triumphant arrival in New York, Alfred A. Knopf published Joseph in Egypt, the third in the monumental series of biblical novels on which the author had begun working twelve years earlier. The book was greeted with rapturous enthusiasm and marked the high point of Mann’s critical acclaim from a purely literary point of view: while even greater laurels were as yet in store for him, they would all be given more for his services to democracy than for those to modern fiction....