Thomas Mann

Mann finished Buddenbrooks at twenty-five, a chronicle of four generations of a Lubeck merchant family modelled closely enough on his own that the city took offence, and the Nobel committee cited it above everything else when it gave him the prize in 1929. The Magic Mountain leaves a young engineer in an Alpine sanatorium for seven years and lets Europe argue itself to pieces around his sickbed. He left Germany in 1933 and never lived there again, lost his citizenship in 1936, settled eventually in California, and broadcast to German listeners over the BBC throughout the war. His brother Heinrich and three of his children wrote as well. He died near Zurich in 1955.