Authors Like Thomas Mann

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

German · The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Elective Affinities (1809), Faust (1808, 1832)

Goethe (1749–1832) spent most of his life in Weimar as a writer, scientist and minister at the ducal court. The Sorrows of Young Werther, told in letters by a young man in hopeless love, made him famous across Europe in his mid-twenties; the two parts of Faust occupied him for most of his life.

Theodor Fontane

German · Effi Briest (1895), The Stechlin (1898)

Fontane (1819–1898) was a pharmacist, journalist and war correspondent who wrote his major novels late in life. Effi Briest follows a girl married at seventeen to a much older Prussian official, and an old affair that ruins her years later. His letters contain antisemitic remarks that scholars have long discussed.

Marcel Proust

French · Swann’s Way (1913), In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927)

Proust (1871–1922) spent the last part of his life writing In Search of Lost Time, a novel in seven volumes narrated by a man whose life closely follows his author’s. The second volume won the Prix Goncourt in 1919, and the last three appeared after his death.

Robert Musil

Austrian · The Confusions of Young Törless (1906), The Man Without Qualities (1930–1943)

Musil (1880–1942) trained as an engineer and studied philosophy before publishing Young Törless, about cruelty at a military boarding school. He spent the rest of his life on The Man Without Qualities, set in Vienna in 1913, and died in exile in Geneva, poor, with the novel unfinished.

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Franz Kafka

Bohemian, German-language · The Metamorphosis (1915), The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926)

Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 into a German-speaking Jewish family, worked for an insurance institute and published little before he died of tuberculosis in 1924. The Trial and The Castle were published after his death by his friend Max Brod, against Kafka’s instructions to destroy his papers.

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Hermann Hesse

German-Swiss · Siddhartha (1922), Steppenwolf (1927), The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Hesse was born in Calw, Württemberg, in 1877, settled in Switzerland and became a Swiss citizen in 1924. Steppenwolf follows a middle-aged intellectual torn between bourgeois life and something wilder; The Glass Bead Game, set in a future order of scholars, was published in Switzerland during the war. He won the Nobel Prize in 1946 and died in 1962.

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Joseph Roth

Austrian · Job (1930), The Radetzky March (1932)

Roth was born in 1894 in Brody, Galicia, on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and became one of the best-known journalists of the Weimar years. The Radetzky March follows three generations of the von Trotta family, whose rise begins when a soldier saves the young Emperor Franz Joseph at the Battle of Solferino. He left Germany in 1933 and died in Paris in 1939.

Stefan Zweig

Austrian · Chess Story (1942), The World of Yesterday (1942)

Zweig was born in Vienna in 1881 and was one of the most widely translated writers of the 1920s and 1930s. He left Austria in 1934 and died in exile in Petrópolis, Brazil, in 1942; The World of Yesterday, his memoir of the vanished Europe of his youth, appeared after his death.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Italian · The Leopard (1958)

Giuseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa, was born in Palermo in 1896 and wrote his only novel in the last years of his life. The Leopard follows Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, as Garibaldi’s landing in Sicily in 1860 ends the old order. Two publishers turned it down, and it appeared in 1958, the year after his death.

Colm Tóibín

Irish · The Master (2004), Brooklyn (2009), The Magician (2021)

Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, in 1955. The Master is a novel about Henry James; The Magician follows Thomas Mann from his Lübeck childhood to exile in California, including the desire for men that Mann recorded in his diaries and kept out of his public life.

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