Discover Mann''s Nobel Prizewinning semi-autobiographical and sweeping family epic.The Buddenbrook clan is everything you''d expect of a nineteenth-century German merchant family - wealthy, esteemed, established. Four generations later, a tide of twentieth-century modernism has gradually disintegrated the bourgeois values on which the Buddenbrooks built their success.In this, Mann''s first novel, his astounding, semi-autobiographical family epic, he portrays the transition of genteel Germanic stability to a very modern uncertainty.''Perhaps the first great novel of the 20th century'' New York Times