Thomas Mann's self-reflexive meditation on the power of representation and the tyranny of the writer's imagination
Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Lubeck, of a line of prosperous and
influential merchants. Mann was educated under the discipline of
North German schoolmasters before working for an insurance office
aged nineteen. During this time he secretly wrote his first tale,
Fallen, and shortly afterwards left the insurance office to study
art and literature at the University in Munich. After a year in
Rome he devoted himself exclusively to writing.
He was only twenty-five when Buddenbrooks, his first major novel,
was published. Before it was banned and burned by Hitler, it had
sold over a million copies in Germany alone. His second great
novel, The Magic Mountain, was published in 1924 and the first
volume of his tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers in 1933. In 1929 he
was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. IN 1933 Thomas Mann
left Germany for Switzerland. Then, after several previous visits,
in 1938 he settled in the United States, where he wrote Doctor
Faustus and The Holy Sinner. Among the honours he received in the
US was his appointment as a Fellow of the Library of Congress. He
revisited his native country in 1949 and returned to Switzerland in
1952, where The Black Swan and Confessions of Felix Krull were
written and where he died in 1955.
A masterpiece
*Stefan Zweig*
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