German novelist who made himself the self-appointed heir to Goethe and the representative voice of the German bourgeois mind at the moment that mind produced — and then was destroyed by — the catastrophes of the 20th century. Buddenbrooks (1901), published when Mann was twenty-six, is the generational decline-of-a-merchant-family novel that won him the 1929 Nobel Prize; The Magic Mountain (1924), set in a Davos tuberculosis sanatorium on the eve of the First World War, is the great European Bildungsroman of ideas. Doctor Faustus (1947) — the life of the composer Adrian Leverkühn, who contracts with the devil for twenty-four years of musical genius and is destroyed — is Mann's attempt to reckon, through the Faust legend, with the German catastrophe.
Mann's early politics were reactionary (Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 1918, defended German Kultur against French Zivilisation); his quarrel with his left-republican brother Heinrich was famous. The 1920s moved him, painfully, toward the Weimar Republic; the rise of the Nazis drove him first into Swiss exile (1933) and then to Princeton and Pacific Palisades, where he broadcast to Germany on the BBC and wrote the Joseph tetralogy (1933–43). After the war he refused to settle in either Germany, returning to Switzerland, where he died.
His homosexuality — acknowledged in the diaries, disguised in the work (most famously in Death in Venice, 1912) — is now a standard frame of reading. His relation to Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Wagner (the "three stars in eternal conjunction" of his youth) runs through everything.