Thomas Mann

Born into Hanseatic merchant class in 1875, Mann turned his own family into literature with Buddenbrooks in 1901, a portrait of bourgeois decay. He spent the next decades building symbolic epics from German and Biblical myth, Goethe, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer — The Magic Mountain in 1924, the four-book Joseph and His Brothers between 1933 and 1943. When Hitler took power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland, then to the United States in 1939, writing Doctor Faustus in exile. Three of his six children became writers; his older brother Heinrich was a novelist. He returned to Switzerland in 1952 and d…