July 25: Elias Canetti

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981, Elias Canetti was born to a Sephardic Jewish family in Ruse, Bulgaria on this date in 1905. He lived in Vienna from age 7 and became fluent in German, the language in which he chose to write. He also spoke English and French, in addition to Bulgarian and his native Ladino. A leftist, Canetti participated in the July Revolt of 1927, an uprising and general strike in Vienna, and fled to London after the Nazis entered Austria in 1938. His best-known books were autobiographical memoirs of pre-Anschluss Vienna, a modernist novel Auto-da-Fé, and a study of crowd behavior ranging from worship to mob violence, Crowds and Power. He was also a playwright and travel writer. Canetti died at 89 in Zurich in 1994.