Inspirational Quotations by Thomas Mann (German Novelist)

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 greatest work, few literary critics shared this assessment.

More: Wikipedia (via CC-BY-SA license) • READ: Works by Thomas Mann