Thomas Mann
- For the political scientist and pundit, see Thomas E. Mann.
Thomas Mann (June 6, 1875 - August 12, 1955) was a German writer and Nobel laureate.
Mann was born in Lübeck. His father was a senator and grain merchant, but died when his son was only 15. The family then moved to Munich, where Mann lived from 1891 until 1933, with the exception of a brief one-year stay in Palestrina, Italy with his brother Heinrich in his early career. He married Katja Pringsheim, daughter of a prominent, secularized Jewish family of intellectuals. He emigrated from Nazi Germany to Küsnacht near Zürich, Switzerland in 1933, then in 1942 to Pacific Palisades, California, USA, returned to Europe in 1952, and lived in Kilchberg near Zürich where he died in 1955.
He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, for Buddenbrooks.
He was the younger brother of novelist Heinrich Mann.
He was the father of Klaus, Erika, Golo (Angelus Gottfried Thomas), Monika, Elisabeth and Michael Mann.
Most of his novels deal with the tension between the unsteady, death-loving artist and the law-obeying, life-affirming citizen. Mann's diaries, unsealed in 1975, speak movingly of his own struggles with his homosexual desires, which found reflection in his works, especially Death in Venice. Mann described his feelings for young violinist and painter Paul Ehrenberg the "central experience of my heart".
Some of his works are frequently included in the Western canon.
Works