Günter Grass's debut novelDie Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959) is almost unanimously acknowledged as one of the outstanding works of postwar German writing, and indeed of modern world literature. And Grass, born in 1927, was only thirty-one when it appeared. The novel's unrestrained exuberance, unabated vigor over more than seven hundred pages, and insolent disregard for established moral and religious sensibilities, seem literally to embody its author's youth. According to reviewers at the time, the author of Die Blechtrommel was “bursting with energy,” “vital,” “scurrilous,” or simply “infantile.” Fellow literary neophyte Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote approvingly of his peer as a “rogue elephant in the domesticated reservation of contemporary German letters.