The author of several of the major classics of modern European fiction, including Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, Buddenbrooks, and The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Thomas Mann was also a staunch opponent of Nazism (which eventually drove him into exile) and a towering presence in German and European intellectual life for more than fifty years. Celebrated biographer Donald Prater traces Mann's life and work from his upbringing in Lubeck, through his years in Munich, his exile in the United States, and his last years in Switzerland. He analyses the image and reality of a man regarded both as arrogant and aloof and as a vulnerable and sensitive witness to the traumatic upheavals of the twentieth century. Particular attention is devoted to Mann's political thinking and his role in the rise and fall of Hitlerism. In Mann's development from nationalistic conservatism to a vigorous humanist anti-Nazism
