German · b. 1875
Nobel Prize in Literature (1929)
Thomas Mann was a German novelist and Nobel laureate whose Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus established him as one of the twentieth century's most important and demanding writers of fiction.
Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, by which point he had already published two of his greatest novels: Buddenbrooks (1901), the multigenerational saga of a Lübeck merchant family’s decline, and The Magic Mountain (1924), a philosophical novel set in a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium in which the ideas contesting for Europe’s soul — humanism, rationalism, disease, and death — are dramatized through a cast of brilliant talkers. Mann’s method is essentially Wagnerian: the elaboration of leitmotifs, the sustained build toward climax, and the insistence on intellectual density.
Death in Venice (1912), the novella about an aging writer’s fatal obsession with a beautiful boy in a cholera-stricken city, is his most perfectly constructed work. In a hundred pages Mann compresses questions about art, beauty, decadence, and the irrational that his longer novels take hundreds of pages to explore. It has never been out of print.
Doctor Faustus (1947), written in American exile during the Nazi period, is his most ambitious late novel: the fictional biography of a composer who makes a Faustian bargain for artistic greatness, read as an allegory of Germany’s catastrophic bargain with fascism. The Joseph and His Brothers tetralogy is his most sustained achievement — a vast mythological retelling of the Old Testament narrative that took sixteen years to complete. Mann’s place in world literature is secure; accessibility is another matter, and most readers are well served by beginning with Death in Venice before approaching the longer works.
by Thomas Mann
Mann's four-volume retelling of the Joseph story from Genesis — sixteen years in the writing — treats the biblical narrative not as sacred history but as myth that characters know they are living inside. The most sustained act of literary ambition of the twentieth century.
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by Thomas Mann
The aging writer Gustav von Aschenbach travels to Venice for rest and becomes obsessed with a beautiful Polish boy, unable to leave even as cholera spreads through the city — Mann's most concentrated masterpiece.
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by Thomas Mann
Four generations of a Lübeck merchant family are traced from their commercial peak in 1835 to their dissolution by the turn of the century — the novel that won Mann the Nobel Prize, and the German equivalent of The Forsyte Saga.
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by Thomas Mann
A German composer of genius makes a Faustian bargain — syphilitic infection in exchange for twenty-four years of musical creativity — as Germany makes its own bargain with Nazism. Told through the biography of his lifelong friend, Mann's most ambitious novel.
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by Thomas Mann
A retelling of the medieval legend of Gregorius — a man born of incest who unknowingly marries his own mother and atones by living on a rocky island for seventeen years before being elected Pope — Mann's most playful late novel.
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by Thomas Mann
Hans Castorp, a young Hamburg engineer, visits his cousin at a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps and stays for seven years — drawn into a world where illness, intellectual debate, and the distortion of time separate the inhabitants from ordinary life on the plains below.
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The best German literature — from The Magic Mountain and The Tin Drum to The Trial and The Metamorphosis. Essential reading from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
guide
Thomas Mann's complete bibliography in order — from The Magic Mountain and Buddenbrooks to Death in Venice and Doctor Faustus. Best starting points for new readers.
guide
Where to start with Thomas Mann — whether to begin with The Magic Mountain, Buddenbrooks, or Death in Venice. A complete reading guide to Mann's novels.
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