A short life of the author
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) was born on 6 June 1875 in Lübeck, Germany, into a wealthy merchant family. He left Germany after the Nazis came to power in 1933, living in Switzerland and then the United States (Pacific Palisades, California) before returning to Switzerland.
Life and Career
Buddenbrooks (1901) — a novel about the decline of a wealthy Lübeck merchant family over four generations — was published when Mann was twenty-five and remains one of the great family novels. Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice, 1912) — about an aging writer’s obsessive infatuation with a beautiful boy on the Lido — is his most famous novella.
Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924) — set in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, where the young Hans Castorp spends seven years among the sick and the intellectual, debating humanism, Jesuitism, disease, time, and death — is his greatest novel: a Bildungsroman that is also a diagnosis of European civilization before World War I.
Doktor Faustus (1947) — about a German composer who makes a pact with the devil, an allegory of Germany’s descent into Nazism — is his late masterpiece. He won the Nobel Prize in 1929.
Major Works and Themes
Mann wrote about the relationship between art and life, illness and creativity, bourgeois society and its dissolution, and the fate of German culture. His prose is ironic, densely layered, and architecturally precise.
Key Works
- The Magic Mountain (1924)
- Buddenbrooks (1901)
Collecting Mann
German first editions (S. Fischer) are the primary collected form. Buddenbrooks first edition (1901) brings $1,000–$5,000. English translations (Knopf, Vintage) bring $15–$40. Mann died in 1955.