Thomas Mann’s achievements stretch over a quarter of a century. The Macon Telegraph prints a succinct account of Mann’s life, with a few words of comment:

“Mann was born in Lubeck, June 6, 1875, and during his school days in a North German gymnasium he did not distinguish himself particularly in scholarship. He was interested, however, in publishing a magazine called Journal of Art, Literature and Philosophy.   His school days over, Mann was sent to Munich, where he was destined for a life of business in a fire-insurance office. During his leisure time he wrote a novel, ‘Gefallen,’ which attracted attention to his talent.

“In 1903 appeared Mann’s ‘Buddenbrooks,’ a novel which has been a steady favorite in Germany. It went through fifty editions in ten years. It was a family novel, showing the disintegration of a German noble family. A large part of the book, observers claimed, was autobiographical.

“Thomas Mann’s greatest work is ‘The Magic Mountain,’ published in this country two years ago. The theater of the Magic Mountain is a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Swiss mountains—a community organized with exclusive reference to ill health. In his symbol the author embodies the diseased capitalistic society of prewar Europe—the world which made war inevitable.

“Mann’s philosophy is said to revolve around the idea that intellectual type is not the ideal toward which evolution moves, but, instead, the man of action. All of his writing constitutes a rejection in literature of the intellectual as an unhealthy growth upon the main body of humanity.”

The New York Herald Tribune gives some additional light upon the man, perhaps better known here by his books than through them:

“Thomas Mann writes in another mood than that prevailing in the current crop of American novelists. ‘The most responsible of living artists,’ he was called at his fiftieth birthday. It is difficult to reconcile his serious work with the fact that he began his literary career as an editor of Simplicissimus, the Munich Punch. Literature is to him, as he himself puts it, ‘a heroic activity, a consecrated life’; and if he is never the crusader, the music of humanity rings in his every page. “‘The Magic Mountain,”‘ Ludwig Lewisohn wrote, ‘is such a novel as H. G. Wells might have written had he added philosophic to scientific culture, and were by temper a great artist rather than an eager propagandist and a telling journalist.’ It is a prose epic, a philosophic symphony which in novel form seeks to affirm, picture, and pass judgment upon an era, and does so without the sense of putrefaction which marks so many lesser efforts to epitomize the age.

“To the solid bourgeois qualities of his Lubeck ancestors—his father was a merchant and a Senator in the little Hanseatic free city—Mann adds a Latin quality which he may have inherited from his Brazilian mother. ‘Death in Venice’ includes, even in inadequate translation, some of the most exquisite prose poetry of our day.

“In honoring Thomas Mann the Swedish Academy gave new luster to the Nobel prizes, for it gave its laurels to a man already recognized as a great world citizen.”

This article on Thomas Mann is continued on our website

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4. Learning to Drive in 1929
5. Nathalia Crane Child Poet 1925

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 11:32 am and is filed under 1920's, Literature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments and pings are closed.

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