Born to a middle-class family in Lübeck, Thomas Mann (1875-1955) moved with his family to Munich after his father’s death. He worked briefly in the insurance business before embarking on a career as a writer. He was a prolific writer of essays and short stories, but he is best known for his novels The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. After Hitler came to power, he fled to Switzerland and then the United States.