Doctor Faustus: Introduction by T. J. Reed

Thomas Mann wrote his last great novel, Doctor Faustus, during his exile from Nazi Germany. Although he already had a long string of masterpieces to his name, in retrospect this seems to be the novel he was born to write.

A modern reworking of the Faust legend in which a twentieth-century composer sells his soul to the devil for the artistic power he craves, the story brilliantly interweaves music, philosophy, theology, and politics. Adrian Leverk hn is a talented young composer who is willing to go to any lengths to reach greater heights of achievement. What he gets is twenty-four years of genius--years of increasingly extraordinary musical innovation intertwined with progressive and destructive madness.

A scathing allegory of Germany's renunciation of its own humanity and its embrace of ambition and nihilism, Doctor Faustus is also a profound meditation on artistic genius. Obsessively exploring the evil into which his country had fallen, Mann succeeds as only he could have in charting the dimensions of that evil; his novel has both the pertinence of history and the universality of myth.

Translated from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter

Author: Thomas Mann
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Everyman's Library
Published: 06/02/1992
Series: Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics
Pages: 580
Weight: 1.34lbs
Size: 8.18h x 5.21w x 1.21d
ISBN: 9780679409960

About the Author
Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Germany. He was only twenty-five when his first novel, Buddenbrooks, was published. In 1924 The Magic Mountain was published, and, five years later, Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Following the rise of the Nazis to power, he left Germany for good in 1933 to live in Switzerland and then in California, where he wrote Doctor Faustus (first published in the United States in 1948). Thomas Mann died in 1955.