How do authors relate to the wider world in which they live and work? What are the mechanisms that make one bestselling author famous well beyond her lifetime while another sinks without trace while still alive? And where does literature fit in to a complex society’s attempts to understand itself, both in terms of what it has been and what it has the potential to become?Authors and the World traces how four core modes of authorship have developed and inflect one another in the particular contexts of late 20th- and early 21st-century Germany. In so doing, it provides not just a radically new approach to German literary history but a thoroughly new paradigm for thinking about what literary authorship is in different places and how it draws in different people from across the Western world.This study traces how four core ‘modes of authorship’ have developed and inflect one another in modern Germany through a series of twenty different case studies, including the work of Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, Anna Seghers, Walter Höllerer, Felicitas Hoppe and Katja Petrowskaja, and original interview material with contemporary writers Ulrike Draesner, Olga Martynova and Ulrike Almut Sandig. ‘Modes of authorship’ are attitudes taken towards being an author that can be seen both in what an individual author does and in how a particular literary tradition or trend is perceived and mediated by others both within and beyond Pierre Bourdieu’s literary field. Consequently, they deliberately straddle questions of literary production and reception. Building on concepts drawn from literary theory, cultural studies, social geography, and science & technology studies (particularly actor-network-theory), the six main chapters set out how the commemorative, celebratory, utopian and satirical modes interact with one another to produce a number of models of authorship that carry either foundational or otherwise normative force for society. These make way for new models only comparatively slowly over the seventy-five years covered in detail by this study (1945-2020). In varying combinations and with deep roots in nineteenth and early twentieth-century practices, the four modes of authorship create a remarkably (and at times troublingly) stable German literature network that to a large degree still determines the way contemporary German-speaking authors enact their cultural significance in their writing, engage with their local circumstances, and are more broadly received around the world. In so doing, the study provides not just a radically new approach to German literary history but a thoroughly new paradigm for thinking about literary authorship.