Thomas Mann

Mann drew Buddenbrooks (1901), his first novel, straight from his own merchant family's decline in Lübeck; he was twenty-five when it appeared. A visit to his wife Katia at a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium seeded The Magic Mountain (1924), which turned the enforced idleness of illness into a debate about European civilization on the eve of war.

He won the Nobel Prize in 1929 and, unlike much of Germany's establishment, refused Hitler outright: he left in 1933, settled eventually in the United States, took American citizenship, and broadcast anti-Nazi radio addresses back into Germany throughout the war. Doctor Faustus (1947), a composer's pact with the devil retelling Germany's own catastrophe, was written in that exile. McCarthy-era suspicion pushed him back to Europe, where he died in Zurich in 1955.