Thomas Mann (1875–1955) was a German novelist who is considered second only to Goethe among German authors.
Born to a Brazilian Catholic mother and German Lutheran grain merchant in Lübeck, Germany, Mann was a mediocre student. He started writing in his spare time while working as a clerk at an insurance company. He later attended a university to train in journalism.
Mann relocated to Italy for a year with his older brother, the writer Heinrich Mann, where Thomas Mann wrote his first collection of short stories, Little Herr Friedemann (1898.) His first novel was Buddenbrooks (1901.) After numerous novellas, including his best-known work Death in Venice (1913,) Mann wrote The Magic Mountain (1924,) for which he won the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature.
When Hitler came to power, Mann went into exile in Switzerland and later the United States. He became an American citizen in 1944. After the war, he refused an invitation to return to Germany to live.
Mann lived in Santa Monica, California, for most of the rest of his life. He worked on the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers (1933–45,) a reinterpretation of the biblical story with modern-day themes. Even though Mann considered this extensive opus to be his most significant work, few literary critics shared this assessment.
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A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Writing
A man lives not only his personal life as an individual but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Service, Living
There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Music
No one remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Awareness, Self-Discovery, Self-Knowledge
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Medicine
A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Death
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Love
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Positive Attitudes, Ideas, Optimism
Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Resilience, Patience
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