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

Author: Thomas Mann

Title: Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrain Leverkuhn as Told by a Friend

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, NY

Year: 1948

Format: Hardcover

Condition: Excellent.

Weight: 640 g

Dimensions: 15 × 22 × 3.5 cm

Clean pages, tight binding, and no markings.

Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter, this is a towering masterpiece of 20th-century literature. The Book of the Month publishers wrote,

“This novel, which has as its narrative framework a modern version of the Faust legend, is the entire life-story of a great creative musician Adrian Leverkühn (1885-1940). It is told by his lifelong friend Serenus Zeitblom, Ph.D.

"In range, depth, variety, and relevance to modern life, it is entirely worthy of the author of The Magic Mountain.

"A theological student turned composer, Leverkühn symbolically enters into a pact with the Devil (who is represented in part by an exhilarating but wasting disease). He sells his soul and body in return for twenty-four years of musical genius. His life during the heightened period of the pact touches on almost every important aspect of present-day experience, artistic, religious, sexual, political, and psychological.

"Scarcely secondary in interest to Leverkühn himself is the narrator, Zeitblom, a scrupulous, learned, scholarly, shocked man who tells much against his will, almost by inadvertence.

"Around these two the novel is inhabited by a rich variety of human beings. It is given profundity and perspective by stores of wisdom, lore, psychological insight, technical discus-sion, musical analysis.

"Through Mann's sovereign handling of his astonishing materials, Doctor Faustus achieves a many-layered credibility. The wonderful and terrible career of Adrian Leverkühn-in-cluding the gestation, actual writing, and inner nature of his chief compositions-is therefore thoroughly engaging as a narrative and symbolic of the purposes and dilemmas of twentieth-century man.

Translated from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter, this 1948 hardcover edition captures Mann’s intellectual depth and haunting allegory of creativity tainted by corruption. A classic of philosophical fiction and musical imagination.”