“One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.”

German novelist and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate

Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, essayist, social critic, and philanthropist. Active in the modern period, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929 and remains closely associated with the literary life of twentieth-century Europe. He is known for highly symbolic and ironic novels and novellas that probe the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His work often reworks German and biblical stories, while drawing on the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer to examine the European and German mind.