One of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Thomas Mann's literary genius reflected a life spent wandering between diverse worlds, especially after escaping Germany in the early 1930s.

Mann rose to global fame when in 1929 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature — primarily for for his great social novel, "Buddenbrooks" (1901), but also for his fiction masterpiece, "The Magic Mountain" (1924).

But during and after the Nazi dictatorship from which he escaped, Mann wrote political essays and delivered radio speeches to his compatriots about the German "catastrophe" that led to the Holocaust. These strident views were often reflected in his work.

Thomas Mann was born on June 6, 1875 in Lübeck, northern Germany, to a merchant family. He was raised with four siblings, and as a schoolboy wrote his first prose sketches and essays — even if he once repeated a grade and was deemed as only a "satisfactory" student of German.

His artistic aspirations did not fit in well in the middle-class mainstream, and his passion for literature saddened his merchant father. This sensitive bohemian's struggle to carry on the family's time-honored business partly inspired Mann's first work, "Buddenbrooks."

When his father died in 1891, Mann left school before completing his A-levels and moved to Munich with his family. Living off his father's inheritance, he soon began to work as a freelance........

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