Buddenbrooks

Acclaimed by The Guardian as "one of the best novels of the twentieth century," Thomas Mann's landmark work chronicles the decline of four generations of a German merchant clan. Ranging from 1835 to 1877, the semi-autobiographical tale traces the dissolution of the family's bonds and traditions in the face of a changing world, exploring not only the fate of an individual household but also the crisis of an entire social class.
With the 1901 publication of Buddenbrooks, his first novel, 26-year-old Mann secured the basis for his literary reputation. The author's skillful combination of nineteenth-century realism with modernist elements provides an accurate reflection of Germany's widespread cultural pessimism in the wake of its rapid industrialization. In addition to its appeal as a sweeping saga of a family's dramatic reversal of fortunes, the book also offers a richly detailed exploration of thought-provoking moral and philosophical themes related to duty, self-expression, and appearance versus reality.

German writer Thomas Mann (1875–1955) is the author of The Magic Mountain, Death in Venice, and other acclaimed novels and short stories, including Buddenbrooks, for which he received the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature. Appalled by the rise of Nazism, Mann fled Germany in 1933 and spent the rest of his life in self-imposed exile, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1944.