Biography Essay

Thomas Mann is one of the most celebrated German writers in history, and he owes part of this fame to the United States, where he held citizenship when he died in 1955 at the age of eighty. In 1929 he received the Nobel Prize in literature. Until then, he had spent most of his life in Germany and had never left Europe. Even when Mann took a trip to Egypt and Palestine a year later in preparation for writing a tetralogy of novels based on the biblical story of Joseph, he could not imagine ever residing anywhere but in Germany. He also regarded himself merely as an unpolitical artist who preferred not to concern himself with the order of the day. When Hitler came to power in 1933, however, Mann decided not to return to Germany from a trip to Switzerland. In the next few years, he became a...