Between 1957 and 1999, the Colloquium-Verlag in Berlin published the series "Köpfe des XX. Jahrhunderts" of writers, philosophers, and artists, sometimes obscure, who are deemed to have been influential or remarkable in the German-speaking world (Germany, Switzerland and Austria, mainly) during the Twentieth century. By 1999, when publication was halted, 137 volumes had appeared, while volumes 133 and 136 were never published. Between 1993 and 1996, publication of the series was temporarily taken over by the Morgenbuch-Verlag in Berlin. Thomas Bernhard by Nicholas J. Meyerhofer is the No. 104th biography in the series, and was originally published in 1985. In 1989, a second extended edition appeared after Thomas Bernhard had died, earlier that year.

Throughout his life, Thomas Bernhard was a remarkable, rebellious and controversial author. His mother gave birth in a convent in Heerlen (the Netherlands) because as a Catholic from Austria she could not have her child born out of wedlock in her hometown, Henndorf am Wallersee, without causing a major scandal. The first year of his life, Bernhard lived in Rotterdam, while his mother worked to pay for the expenses incurred by traveling to the Netherlands. The next two years were spent in Vienna, and after that in Seekirchen am Wallersee. From 1938 to 1943, he lived with his parents in Traunstein, in Upper-Bavaria, where he soon got his first impressions of Nazism, and the remaining years of the war were spent at a boarding school in Salzburg.

A lot is known about Thomas Bernhard's youth up until the age of 19, as he published his autobiography describing those years in five volumes. This autobiography also shows that much of his other work is autobiographical. Bernhard described his own youth as incredibly "chaotic, painful and lonely" while he described school as a "catastrophic dumb-down machinery".

In the years immediately after the war, Thomas Bernhard took up a job, and started attending music lessons. The hard work and poor living conditions brought him down with a pneumonia, which, when delivered to hospital, doctors thought would kill him. However, Thomas Bernhard made a resolution not to die, especially after his grandfather, who was in the same hospital with him, died there. Grafenhof was a hospital where most people died, and few were released cured. It was here that Thomas Bernhard started writing, initially only poetry.

Thomas Bernhard's five-volume autobiography is not merely a factual description of his youth, but was conceived as an "artful" literary biography, in which some events were exaggerated. This tendency to make generalizations and exaggerate would stay with Bernhard throughout his literary career, and it would often be the cause of controversy and aggression his plays, for instance, elicited from his audiences.

In subsequent chapters, this short biography of Thomas Bernhard describes his prose and dramatic works, each linked with the biographical sources and reception at the time.

Wikipedia described Thomas Bernard's early youth as follows:

The next year his mother returned to Austria, where Bernhard spent much of his early childhood with his maternal grandparents in Vienna and Seekirchen am Wallersee north of Salzburg. His mother's subsequent marriage in 1936 occasioned a move to Traunstein in Bavaria. (...)

(...) Bernhard went to elementary school in Seekirchen and later attended various schools in Salzburg including the Johanneum which he left in 1947.

A comparison with the biography by Nicholas J. Meyerhofer shows that the Wikipedia text is very vague and easily leads to misunderstandings, such as about the year he moved to Bavaria. Technically speaking, Wikipedia is not wrong, but the so vague and concise that it must lead to a wrong idea. It shows that there is still a need to well-researched biographies, such as these.

Thomas Bernhard by Nicholas J. Meyerhofer is a very short biography (only 102 pp.), which mainly focuses on the relation between biographical facts and the work and reception of Thomas Bernard. ( )