Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann was the most honoured German novelist of his century, Nobel laureate in 1929, and an exile from 1933, first in Switzerland and then in California, where he broadcast to Germany against Hitler. Buddenbrooks, written at twenty-five, chronicles a merchant family’s decline; Death in Venice is the story of an artist undone by beauty; The Magic Mountain sets seven years in a sanatorium as an allegory of Europe before 1914; Joseph and His Brothers, in four volumes, retells Genesis. His subject was always the artist’s uneasy place among ordinary lives.