Front Flap:

This volume, first issued in 1936, contains everything published by Thomas Mann except his novels and essays.  Here the reader will find twenty-four stories, including TONIO KRØGER and TRISTAN, written while Mr. Mann was still in his twenties—and indisputably "stories of mature genius." Here, too, are the novelette DEATH IN VENICE, which has been called "surely the most beautiful long short story ever written"; DISORDER AND EARLY SORROW; A MAN AND HIS DOG; THE BLOOD OF THE WALSUNGS; and MARIO AND THE MAGICIAN.

Of these twenty-four stores, all written from 1896 (DISILLUSIONMENT) to 1929 (MARIO AND THE MAGICIAN), the New York Times said: "[They] are of such breadth and magnitude and so significant that they belong in any library pretending to embrace the best work of our generation." And Clifton Fadiman wrote: "The career of Thomas Mann offers the rare spectacle of a youthful prodigy who has never stopped developing. It is a career which opens in the flush of genius and continues to progress with almost symphonic logic, harmony, and beauty."

Back Flap:

THOMAS MANN was born in 1875, in the ancient Hanseatic city of Lubeck, of a line of influential merchants. His father had been a senator and twice mayor of the Free City; his mother was of Germanic-Creole descent. An ideal boyhood was passed for the most part in the comfortable family home in Lübeck.

He was nineteen when he removed to Munich, where he worked in an insurance office. In 1894, after the publication of his first novelette, GEFALLEN, he gave up office work for the study of art and literature at the University of Munich. Then came one year in Rome, and from that time on, Thomas Mann devoted himself exclusively to writing. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929.

After several visits to the United States, he settled temporarily in Princeton, New Jersey, where he lectured at the University. In 1941 he built a home in Pacific Palisades, California, and it was there that he wrote DOCTOR FAUSTUS and THE HOLY SINNER.  In 1949 Thomas Mann made a brief visit to Germany, his first contact with his native land in sixteen years; in 1952 he returned to Europe to take up permanent residence in Switzerland, where he expanded the early short story entitled "Felix Krull" into the CONFESSIONS OF FELIX KRULL, CONFIDENCE MAN. He died at Zurich on August 12, 1955.