The Story of a Novel

The Genesis of Doctor Faustus

By Thomas Mann

1949

First Published

3.87

Average Rating

220

Number of Pages

6H43M

Audio Length

What happened during the genesis of Thomas Manns great 'German Novel' Doktor Faustus, the life of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn, told by a friend, the political and family events as well as the world-historical, was carefully noted in his diaries. Eighteen months after he finished the book, late June 1948, he "had an autobiographical fragment on his mind, concerning the period of the Faustus and he immediately started writing this Story of a Novel, for "many things are to be said about this remarkable adventure of creation. Gradually while writing it however, he realized it was "really more like an autobiographical work, of which I am not quite sure whether to publish it publically or rather keep it just among friends". On the other side, it was intended as a general 'thank you' for "all the support..., I got during the work"- and so it the fragment grew into a little book of its own, and "clearly too long, to serve as preface or afterword to accompany the novel"; when reading the novel of Doktor Faustus, in which everything, as Thomas Mann confessed, is an indirect self-confession, this book is the companion that explains about the relations with all those personal and historical events.

Avg Rating

3.87

Number of Ratings

146

5 STARS

29%

4 STARS

41%

3 STARS

21%

2 STARS

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Thomas Mann

Author · 60 books

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information. See also: Serbian: Tomas Man Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate in 1929, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer. His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann, and three of his six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became important German writers. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he emigrated to the United States, from where he returned to Switzerland in 1952. Thomas Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called Exilliteratur.