Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann was a German novelist and essayist, born in Lübeck on 6 June 1875 into a family of merchants. That background, and the tension between bourgeois order and the artist's restless inner life, became one of his lasting subjects. His first great success, Buddenbrooks, appeared when he was still in his twenties. He went on to write novellas and large novels marked by irony, psychological depth and a close interest in music, illness, philosophy and the fate of European culture. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. A critic of the Nazi movement, he left Germany in the early 1930s and spent many years in exile, including a long period in the United States, before settling again in Europe. He died on 12 August 1955. Mann remains one of the central figures of twentieth-century literature, admired for showing how private lives reflect the crises of an age.