Description: The Magic Mountain is a vast intellectual drama of the forces that play upon modern man. Its theater is a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps-a community organized with exclu- sive reference to ill health. In this symbol Thomas Mann bodies forth the diseased society of Europe before 1914-the com- plete world that made conflict inevitable. His ostensible hero, a young marine engi- neer of no particular importance in himself, becomes profoundly important by virtue of what he represents: humanity under the stress of experiences that engulf the mere individual identity. In fine, The Magic Mountain-one of the key works of twen- tieth-century literature-tells the complete story of a consciousness in the making, a mind wrought to its final shape by creative agents that are simply those forces of nature, fate, and environment which rule the world common to us all. To this volume has been appended an article by Thomas Mann entitled "The Making of 'The Magic Mountain," which first ap- peared in The Atlantic Monthly. The photograph of THOMAS MANN on the front of this jacket was taken by ALFRED A. KNOPF on Mann's eightieth birthday, June 6, 1955. Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in the ancient Hanseatic city of Lübeck, of a line of influ- ential merchants. His father had been a senator and twice mayor of the Free City; his mother was of Germanic-Creole descent. An ideal boy- hood was passed for the most part in the com- fortable family home in Lübeck. Under the drastic discipline of his North Ger- man schoolmasters, Mann proved anything but brilliant; he early developed what was to be a lifelong hatred of Prussian education. He was nineteen when he removed to Munich, where he worked in an insurance office. In 1894, after the publication of his first novelette, Gefallen, he gave up office work for the study of art and literature at the University of Munich. Then came one year in Rome, and from that time on, Thomas Mann devoted himself exclu- sively to writing. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. Mann was only twenty-five when Budden- brooks, his first major novel, was published. His second great work, The Magic Mountain, was issued in 1924. In 1926 the chance request of a Munich artist for an introduction to a portfolio of Joseph drawings became the gene- sis of the tetralogy entitled Joseph and His Brothers, the first volume of which was pub- lished in German in 1933. It was in that year too that Mann left Germany to settle for a time in Switzerland. After several visits to the United States, he settled temporarily in Princeton, New Jersey, where he lectured at the University. In 1941 he built a home in Pacific Palisades, California, and it was there that he wrote Doctor Faustus and The Holy Sinner. In 1949 Thomas Mann made a brief visit to Germany, his first contact with his native land in sixteen years; in 1952 he returned to Europe to take up permanent residence in Switzerland, where he expanded the early short story entitled "Felix Krull" into the Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. He died at Zurich on August 12, 1955.
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Language: English
Author: Thomas Mann
Publisher: Knopf
Topic: Magic
