Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
Certainly not the stuff of a Nobel Prize.
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Buddenbrooks saw it's first printing in 1901 and it was Mann's first large publication. Mann received the Nobel Price in 1929 and it was said that he received the Nobel Price
for this book in the Citation by the Nobel Committee.
But Mann was famous for quite different works then. Tonio Kröger, 1903. Death in Venice, 1912. The Magic Mountain, 1924.
I think it's quite obvious that the Nobel Committee claimed that Mann got the Nobel Price for Buddenbrooks to avoid any discussion about the nature of Mann's more recent works.
When Hermann Hesse got the Nobel Price in 1946, he received it for his complete works, like most people do. It's really rare that an author receives the Nobel Price just for a single work. Mann is an exception here, and Buddenbrooks is an exception within Mann's works since it's a book that describes events that a reader of Mann's later works might find boring.