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

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.” 

Details:

• Author: Thomas Mann

• Translator: H. T. Lowe-Porter

• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, NY

• Year: 1948

• Format: Hardcover

• Language: English (translated from German)

• Condition: Excellent — clean pages, tight binding, no markings

• Weight: 640 g

• Dimensions: 15 × 22 × 3.5 cm