“To be young means to be original, to have remained nearer to the sources of life: it means to be able to stand up and shake off the fetters of an outlived civilization, to dare -- where others lack the courage-- to plunge again into the elemental.”

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.