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  • Published: 1 April 1997
  • ISBN: 9780749386825
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $24.99

Royal Highness




KEY POINTS: * Mann is a giant figure in 20th Century litrature and a Nobel Prize Winner. * Has been core Peguin backlist for years- now reverting to Minerva. * Brilliant new Mann packinging. * A superb new addition to the core Minerva 20th century classics.

THE BOOK: One of Thomas Mann's most delightful stories, Royal Highness is richly resonant with may of his themes and symbols. His careful depiction of a decaying, stratified society rejuvenated by modern forces illustrates in fable what he regarded as a universal truth - that ripeness and death are a necessary condition of rebirth.

  • Published: 1 April 1997
  • ISBN: 9780749386825
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Lubeck, of a line of prosperous and influential merchants. Mann was educated under the discipline of North German schoolmasters before working for an insurance office aged nineteen. During this time he secretly wrote his first tale, Fallen, and shortly afterwards left the insurance office to study art and literature at the University in Munich. After a year in Rome he devoted himself exclusively to writing.

He was only twenty-five when Buddenbrooks, his first major novel, was published. Before it was banned and burned by Hitler, it had sold over a million copies in Germany alone. His second great novel, The Magic Mountain, was published in 1924 and the first volume of his tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers in 1933. In 1929 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. IN 1933 Thomas Mann left Germany for Switzerland. Then, after several previous visits, in 1938 he settled in the United States, where he wrote Doctor Faustus and The Holy Sinner. Among the honours he received in the US was his appointment as a Fellow of the Library of Congress. He revisited his native country in 1949 and returned to Switzerland in 1952, where The Black Swan and Confessions of Felix Krull were written and where he died in 1955.

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