Death in Venice Author: [Germany] Thomas Mann Translator: Qian Hongjia/Liu Dezhong Publisher: Shanghai Translation Publishing House Top 10 Popular German Literature Books

Thomas Mann is the most dazzling star in the German literary world in the 20th century. His works have a wide range of global influence. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. Thomas Mann was born on June 6, 1875 in a wealthy merchant family in Lübeck, northern Germany. His father, Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann (1840-1890), was a grain tycoon and later served as a senator and deputy mayor. His mother, Julia Mann (1851-1923), was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and was born into a wealthy family with Portuguese ancestry. His father was serious, calm, and rational, while his mother was passionate and unrestrained and loved art. He had an older brother, a younger brother, and two younger sisters. His elder brother, Heinrich Mann, later became a world-famous writer. In October 1890, his father died and the business went bankrupt, so the whole family moved to Munich to settle down in 1892. The following year, he graduated from a liberal arts high school and later worked as an intern in a fire insurance company. Thomas Mann was fond of literature and art in his early years and read widely. During his studies, he used the pen name Paul Thomas to publish poems and essays in the magazines "Spring Breeze" and "Society", but they were not noticed. When he was an intern in an insurance company, he imitated the style of French writers Bourget and Maupassant and wrote a story about the love between an actress and a college student. This was the novella "The Fall" published in the magazine "Society" in October 1894.

In 1895, he left the insurance company and studied at the Munich Higher School as an auditor. He not only audited courses such as art history and literary history, but was also very interested in economics. At the same time, he reviewed and wrote book reviews for the "Pages on German Art and Welfare in the 20th Century" edited by his brother Heinrich Mann.