Buddenbrooks
  • Published: 1 October 1996
  • ISBN: 9780749386474
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 864
  • RRP: $24.99

Buddenbrooks

Formats & editions
Paperback
1 Oct 1996
Hardback
15 Oct 1994
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Mann's semi-autobiographical and sweeping family epic. The book that won him the Nobel Prize for Literature

Discover Mann's Nobel Prizewinning semi-autobiographical and sweeping family epic.

The Buddenbrook clan is everything you'd expect of a nineteenth-century German merchant family - wealthy, esteemed, established. Four generations later, a tide of twentieth-century modernism has gradually disintegrated the bourgeois values on which the Buddenbrooks built their success.

In this, Mann's first novel, his astounding, semi-autobiographical family epic, he portrays the transition of genteel Germanic stability to a very modern uncertainty.

'Perhaps the first great novel of the 20th century' New York Times
  • Published: 1 October 1996
  • ISBN: 9780749386474
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 864
  • RRP: $24.99
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About the author

Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Lubeck, of a line of prosperous and influential merchants. Mann was educated under the discipline of North German schoolmasters before working for an insurance office aged nineteen. During this time he secretly wrote his first tale, Fallen, and shortly afterwards left the insurance office to study art and literature at the University in Munich. After a year in Rome he devoted himself exclusively to writing.

He was only twenty-five when Buddenbrooks, his first major novel, was published. Before it was banned and burned by Hitler, it had sold over a million copies in Germany alone. His second great novel, The Magic Mountain, was published in 1924 and the first volume of his tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers in 1933. In 1929 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. IN 1933 Thomas Mann left Germany for Switzerland. Then, after several previous visits, in 1938 he settled in the United States, where he wrote Doctor Faustus and The Holy Sinner. Among the honours he received in the US was his appointment as a Fellow of the Library of Congress. He revisited his native country in 1949 and returned to Switzerland in 1952, where The Black Swan and Confessions of Felix Krull were written and where he died in 1955.

Also by Thomas Mann

Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man
Confessions Of Felix Krull
Lotte In Weimar
Joseph and His Brothers
Collected Stories (Mann)
Little Herr Friedmann And Other Stories
Death In Venice
See all

Praise for Buddenbrooks

An absorbing, well-observed, almost film-like telling of a family in Lubeck over a generation or two

Independent

Has extraordinary value as a document over and above its importance as literature. The friendly dispassionateness of the book, the amplitude, the final perfection of clearness, make it as satisfying as a Dürer drawing

Observer

Perhaps the first great novel of the 20th century

New York Times

A detailed portrait of a family and its destructive impact

New York Times

One of the best novels of the 20th century

Guardian

That definitive epic of German family life

Irish Times

His masterpiece

Los Angeles Times

A simple but magnificent proof of genius. A first novel by a 25-year-old with absolute command of his craft, uncanny knowledge of his world, its past and present, and a daring originality which makes its last pages among the most startlingly moving I know

Alan Hollinghurst, New York Times

One of the greatest things a novel can do is to create a world - and this is one of the most richly evoked and inhabited of all

Michael Frayn, Week