First published in 1901, when Thomas Mann was only twenty-five, Buddenbrooks is a minutely imagined chronicle of four generations of a North German mercantile family - a work so true to life that it scandalized the author"s former neighbours in his native Lubeck. As he charts the Buddenbrooks" decline from prosperity to bankruptcy, from moral and psychic soundness to sickly piety, artistic decadence and madness, Mann ushers the reader into a world of vitality, pieced together from births and funerals, weddings and divorces, recipes, gossip and earthy humour.