Thomas Mann (Author) Thomas Mann (1875-1955) is regarded by many as the greatest German novelist of the 20th century. Mann's first major novel, Buddenbrooks, sold over a million copies in Germany alone, before Hitler banned and burned it. Mann fled Germany and spent the latter part of his life living in Switzerland and America. He wrote many essays as well as novels, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.
The most life-changing novel * Stylist * Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love -- Jonathan Coe * The Guardian * All the characters in Thomas Mann’s masterpiece come considerably closer to speaking English in John E. Woods’s version…Woods captures perfectly the irony and humor. * New York Times Book Review * A monumental writer * The Spectator * [Woods’s translation] succeeds in capturing the beautiful cadence of [Mann’s] ironically elegant prose. * Washington Post Book World * [The Magic Mountain] is one of those works that changed the shape and possibilities of European literature. It is a masterwork, unlike any other. It is also, if we learn to read it on its own terms, a delight, comic and profound, a new form of language, a new way of seeing. -- A. S. Byatt