Thomas Mann

Paul Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, essayist and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, whose highly symbolic and ironic novels are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. He portrayed his own Hanseatic merchant family in his first novel, Buddenbrooks (1901), and went on to write The Magic Mountain (1924), the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers (1933-1943), Doctor Faustus (1947) and the novella Death in Venice (1912). When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 Mann fled to Switzerland and later moved to the United States during the Second World War, becoming one of the best-known exponents of Exilliteratur, German literature written in exile by opponents of the Hitler regime.