![]() ![]() Late in his life, when working on Doctor Faustus (1947), he wondered, rather overdespondently, whether he would ever be able to write a better novel than his first, which had almost at once established his national fame and twenty-eight years later won him the Nobel prize. Mann himself, however, was not convinced that the major fictional form was really more suited to his characteristic talent than the short story. ![]() ![]() Mann is generally thought of as a novelist rather than as a writer of short stories (or Novellen, as they are usually called in German), and his total output of about thirty stories is quantitatively only a small fraction of his output of major novels. The other stories here selected all belong to the turn of the century, when Mann (born in 1875) was in his twenties two were published a few years before The Buddenbrooks, the rest shortly after it. This period contains at its end his greatest story, Death in Venice (1912, first book edition 1913), and also, near its beginning, his first and (as many would still say) greatest novel, The Buddenbrooks 1 (1901). Introduction THE PRESENT selection of Thomas Mann’s stories represents a period in his work of about twenty years, from his literary beginnings to just before the First World War. DEATH IN VENICE AND OTHER TALES Thomas Mann ![]()
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