Doctor Faustus (Everyman's Library)

Doctor Faustus (Everyman's Library)

<p>Thomas Mann wrote his last great novel, <i>Doctor Faustus</i>, during his exile from Nazi Germany. Although he already had a long string of masterpieces to his name, in retrospect this seems to be the novel he was born to write. <br><br>A modern reworking of the Faust legend in which a twentieth-century composer sells his soul to the devil for the artistic power he craves, the story brilliantly interweaves music, philosophy, theology, and politics. Adrian Leverkühn is a talented young composer who is willing to go to any lengths to reach greater heights of achievement. What he gets is twenty-four years of genius—years of increasingly extraordinary musical innovation intertwined with progressive and destructive madness. <br><br> A scathing allegory of Germany’s renunciation of its own humanity and its embrace of ambition and nihilism, <i>Doctor Faustus</i> is also a profound meditation on artistic genius. Obsessively exploring the evil into which his country had fallen, Mann succeeds as only he could have in charting the dimensions of that evil; his novel has both the pertinence of history and the universality of myth. <br>  <br> Translated from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter<br>  <br>  <br><br></p>