Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn, as Told by a Friend

Tells the story of Adrian Leverkuhn, a theological student turned composer, who symbolically enters into a pact with the Devil, selling his soul and body in return for twenty-four years of musical genius.

Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Germany. He was only twenty-five when his first novel, Buddenbrooks, was published. In 1924 The Magic Mountain was published, and, five years later, Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Following the rise of the Nazis to power, he left Germany for good in 1933 to live in Switzerland and then in California, where he wrote Doctor Faustus (first published in the United States in 1948). Thomas Mann died in 1955.


From the Hardcover edition.