The Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889-1955

by Thomas Mann, Richard Winston (Editor), Clara Winston (Editor)

This selection of Thomas Mann's letters, first published in a Vintage edition in 1975, spans sixty-six years from the first, written by a precocious fourteen-year-old, to the last, composed on his deathbed by the eighty-year-old Nobel Laureate, and includes letters to family and to such celebrated contemporaries as Gide, Freud, Brecht, Einstein, Hesse, Schoenberg, and Adorno. Covering two world wars and exile in Europe and America, Mann's letters offer the reader insight into the concerns and values of one of the great writers of our time.

Genres: Biography, Literary Criticism

482 pages, Paperback

First published December 14, 1970

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

See also:
Serbian: Tomas Man

Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate in 1929, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer. His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann, and three of his six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became important German writers. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he emigrated to the United States, from where he returned to Switzerland in 1952. Thomas Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called Exilliteratur.

Reviews

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mann was so strange an individual, being at once a perfectly wise gentleman & neurotic lunatic, so his diaries and letters seem like they should be particularly exciting. While the diaries do include a number of interesting reflections on his own homosexuality and the political developments, it seems that either his bourgeois manners, or else a shy repression, prevented him from saying in his letters much of what he truly thought. This volume, then, mostly amounts to a scattered & superficial summary of his life & the more surface-level concepts of his writings. I do quite like its lengthy introduction about the life and meaning of Thomas Mann, which has the added benefit of having been written prior to the release of documents that confirmed his homosexuality, making for some amusing moments of speculation about his sense of the erotic.