Thomas Mann (Paul Thomas Mann, from 1875 to 1955) was a German novelist and essayist, winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born on June 6, 1875, in Lübeck, the second son of the senator and grain merchant Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann and of Júlia da Silva Bruhns, of Brazilian origin. After his father's death in 1891, the family firm was liquidated and the family moved to Munich. In 1905 he married Katia Pringsheim, with whom he had six children.
He made his debut as a novelist with Buddenbrooks (1901), the story of the decline of a family of merchants from Lübeck over four generations. Then came the novella Death in Venice (1912), the novel The Magic Mountain (1924), the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers (1933 to 1943), and Doctor Faustus (1947). In awarding the Nobel in 1929, the Swedish Academy cited above all Buddenbrooks.
He opposed Nazism. He left Germany in February 1933, settled in Switzerland, lost his German citizenship in 1936, moved to the United States in 1938 (the English-language Wikipedia gives 1939), and became an American citizen in 1944. During the war he spoke to Germans in radio broadcasts aired by the BBC. He returned to Switzerland in 1952, and the Portuguese-language Wikipedia links the return to the persecution of exiled intellectuals during the McCarthy period. He died on August 12, 1955, at the age of 80, in the Zurich region.
In one sentence, for children: Thomas Mann was a German writer who wrote very famous novels, won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and had to leave Germany because he was against Hitler.
On Clavis: The Magic Mountain.