Faustus

My first bookstore was the long-ago vanquished Pickwick Books on Hollywood Boulevard, the same locale where a young Susan Sontag was caught shoplifting a copy of “Doctor Faustus.”

Mr. Woods translated some of the best-known novels written by Mr. Mann, a Nobel Prize winner: “Doctor Faustus,” “Buddenbrooks,” “Joseph and His Brothers” and “The Magic Mountain.”

It was as if these fictional travel documents concentrated all the exiles and displacements that built midcentury American culture, of Mies van der Rohe and Marlene Dietrich, of “Doctor Faustus” and “Broadway Boogie-Woogie.”

While studying at Magdalen College at the University of Oxford, he staged plays including Christopher Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus,” recruiting the aging occultist Aleister Crowley to advise the cast on the practice of magic.

His undergraduate staging of Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus,” presented in a tiny London theater, raised 17 British pounds for the Aid to Russia Fund.