Doctor Faustus

by Thomas Mann (Author), H.T. Lowe-Porter (Author)

New
Paperback
1996
$13.65

Adrian Leverkuhn is a young man destined for success. He is a composer - creative and brilliant, but he will stop at nothing to achieve greatness. Intentionally contracting syphilis in order to deepen his creative potential through madness, Adrian makes his pact with nature. Mann's interpretation of the Faustian legend is a story of madness and sanity, genius and corruption, intellectual attainment and Germany's moral fall.

Synopsis

Adrian Leverkuhn is a young man destined for success. He is a composer - creative and brilliant, but he will stop at nothing to achieve greatness. Intentionally contracting syphilis in order to deepen his creative potential through madness, Adrian makes his pact with nature. Mann's interpretation of the Faustian legend is a story of madness and sanity, genius and corruption, intellectual attainment and Germany's moral fall.

$13.65

Save:$2.17 (14%)

Quantity

12 in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 752
Edition: New Ed
Publisher: Vintage Classics
Published: 28 Oct 1996
ISBN 10: 0749386576
ISBN 13: 9780749386573
Book Overview: A masterpiece of German modernism and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century

Media Reviews

John E. Woods is revising our impression of Thomas Mann, masterpiece by masterpiece. * The New Yorker *
Doctor Faustus is Mann's deepest artistic gesture. . . . Finely translated by John E. Woods. * The New Republic *
Arguably the great German novel * New York Times *
Perhaps not since Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus has a novelist conveyed so tangibly and exaltedly the mechanism and the aesthetic effect in musical performance * New York Times *
The real masterpiece * New York Times *

Author Bio

Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Lubeck, of a line of prosperous and influential merchants. Mann was educated under the discipline of North German schoolmasters before working for an insurance office aged nineteen. During this time he secretly wrote his first tale, Fallen, and shortly afterwards left the insurance office to study art and literature at the University in Munich. After a year in Rome he devoted himself exclusively to writing. He was only twenty-five when Buddenbrooks, his first major novel, was published. Before it was burned by Hitler, it had sold over a million copies in Germany alone. His second great novel, The Magic Mountain, was published in 1924 and the first volume of his tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers in 1933. In 1929 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In 1933 Thomas Mann left Germany to live in Switzerland. Then, after several previous visits, in 1938 he settled in the United States where he wrote Doctor Faustus and The Holy Sinner. Among the honours he received in the USA was his appointment as a Fellow of the Library of Congress. He revisited his native country in 1949 and returned to Switzerland in 1952, where The Black Swan and Confessions of Felix Krull were written and where he died in 1955.