Gustav von Aschenbach, famous elderly writer, goes to Venice and becomes obsessed with a beautiful Polish boy named Tadzio. Thomas Mann published this novella in 1912, and it established the archetype of fatal aesthetic obsession: the artist destroyed by beauty. The prose is deliberately ornate, the classical references dense, the cholera that claims Aschenbach as much mythic as medical. Mann himself vacationed in Venice and saw a boy who moved him. The novella transforms autobiography into myth.