The Confessions of Felix Krull

Overview: Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, and 1929's Nobel Prize laureate, 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 focused on modernized German and Biblical stories, and drew from the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer. His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland and later to the United States.