Buddenbrooks

The Buddenbrooks have worked hard to make their name, and the eponymous firm of Johann Buddenbrook is widely known for its trading prowess. But despite trappings like an imposing town house on Meng Street, under the surface the cracks are showing: Johann's first son isn't living up to the status the family desires, and there are more problems to come. Buddenbrooks is a biographical novel spanning over forty years and four generations, and charts the dwindling fortunes of the Buddenbrooks through their lives in an unnamed north German town, albeit one heavily modeled on Thomas Mann's hometown of Lübeck. It was Mann's first novel and was published when he was just twenty-six, following a period of heavy research into the intricacies of the Lübecker bourgeoisie of the mid-nineteenth-century. The critical reception was exceptionally positive, eventually leading to a Nobel Prize in Literature for Mann which, unusually, specifically referenced Buddenbrooks as the principal reason for the award. A sweeping, intimate portrait of a merchant dynasty's slow unraveling across generations, as ambition, duty, and desire quietly erode the family's grip on the world it built. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)