Thomas Mann won the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature and wrote The Magic Mountain.
Mann was a German novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and public intellectual. His early family saga Buddenbrooks, published in 1901, established his reputation, while The Magic Mountain appeared in 1924.
The Magic Mountain is set in a Swiss sanatorium before World War I. Through conversations about illness, politics, time, and European culture, Mann creates a broad intellectual portrait of a society approaching catastrophe.
Mann left Germany after the Nazi rise to power in 1933 and later became an American citizen. He is sometimes confused with his brother Heinrich Mann, also a prominent German writer, but only Thomas Mann received the Nobel Prize in Literature.