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When I was an undergraduate in the 60s, it was universally agreed that the three great novelists of the 20th century were Joyce, Proust, and Thomas Mann: Joyce for his technical innovations and his having invented the modern novel, Proust for the elaboration and refinement of his literary vision, and Thomas Mann for—well—all-around excellence. His literary output was large: a dozen or so major novels, including three very major ones indeed—Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustur, a handful of classic short stories which include Tonio Kroeger and Death in Venice, and a set of essays which range in subject matter from politics to psychoanalysis, music, and philosophy. His technical control of literary form, mastery of esoteric intellectual subjects, innovative play of irony and voice, and up-to-the-minute awareness of currents in politics and art were all—to rescue an abused term—simply awesome.
Then there was the life itself. Eschewing formal education, he became perhaps the most learned of major novelists, and his difficult novels became best-sellers in Germany and in the United States. Born into a well-to-do North German merchant family to a mother with mysterious Creole blood, he married the immensely wealthy, brilliant (she studied physics with Roentgen, discoverer of X-rays), beautiful, and Jewish Katia Pringsheim. Having been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, he left all his wealth, connections, and status behind as he courageously defied the Nazis and started life over again in his 50s with his family in America, where he tirelessly fought the Nazis on the intellectual front. He became the model for the informed and politically engaged writer. Some said he delusionally believed he was Goethe; others that he delusionally believed he was Thomas Mann.