A master of refined and tightly structured prose, and arguably one of the most important literary figures of twentieth-century Germany, Paul Thomas Mann was born June 6, 1875, in Lubeck, Germany, the second son of Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann and Julia da Silva-Bruhns, a wealthy Brazilian and daughter of a former citizen of Lubeck. Although pampered by his mother, Mann strove during childhood to please his father, a grain exporter who wanted his son to take over the family business. When his father died in 1891, the family dissolved the business and moved to Munich, where Mann attended the University of Munich, pursued a writing career, and studied the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. He published his first book, a collection of stories titled Little Herr Friedemann in 1898, when he was just twenty-two years old. Following in the footsteps of his older brother, Luiz Heinrich, who was...