Thomas Mann's Novellas

About Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) was the dominant German novelist of the first half of the twentieth century — the author of Buddenbrooks (1901, Nobel Prize 1929), The Magic Mountain (1924), and Doctor Faustus (1947), as well as several novellas of which Death in Venice (1912) and Tonio Kröger (1903) are the most celebrated. Born in Lübeck into a merchant family, he drew on that milieu for Buddenbrooks — the four-generation decline of a prosperous family — and spent the rest of his career exploring the tension between the bourgeois world and the artist's dangerous commitment to beauty and dissolution. Death in Venice is the ideal entry point to his fiction: 90 pages that compress his central concerns into a single sustained argument. The Magic Mountain is the great European Bildungsroman between the wars; Doctor Faustus is his most demanding and most explicitly allegorical work. Mann lived in exile in Switzerland and then the United States from 1933 onward, returning to Switzerland after the war. He is the foremost representative of German Bildung — the cultural ideal of self-cultivation through art and learning — and of its catastrophic failure.