The German novelist and essayist Thomas Mann (1875-1955) was perhaps the most influential and representative German author of his time.

Born in the free Hanseatic city of Lübeck on the Baltic Sea, the second son of a north German patrician merchant and senator in the city government, Thomas Mann often stressed his twofold heritage: his South American mother, from Rio de Janeiro, was the daughter of a German planter who had emigrated to Brazil and married a woman of Portuguese-Creole origin.

Mann's family can be compared to that of the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich von Schlegel, leading poet-critics in German romanticism: his elder brother Heinrich was an outstanding novelist and essayist. A younger brother, Viktor, a civil servant in Germany, made a name for himself as author of an important family chronicle, Wir waren fünf (1948). Two of Mann's six children, Erika and Klaus...