num_pages: 352
description: Born in 1931, the illegitimate child of an abandoned mother, Thomas Bernhard was brought up by an eccentric grandmother and adored grandfather. Tormented as a young student in a right-wing, catholic Austria, Bernhard ran away from home aged fifteen. At eighteen he contracted pneumonia. Placed in a hospital ward for the old and terminally ill, he observed with unflinching acuity protracted suffering and death. From the age of twenty-one, everything he wrote was shaped by the urgency of a dying man's testament - his witness, the quintessence of his life and knowledge - and where this account of his life ends, his art begins.
language: English
title: Gathering Evidence
titlecomplete: Gathering Evidence
genres: Germany, Unfinished, Biography, Literature, German Literature, Classics, Autobiography, Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography Memoir
ratings_count: 686
series: Autobiography
publisher: Vintage Books