Essays on Thomas Mann

These essays, written over a number of decades, are intended to throw light on the central problems of the work of Thomas Mann whom Lukács describes as 'the last great bourgeois writer'. Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian and critic. His literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture as part of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic , Lukács hoped that socialist culture and its qualities would eventually overcome.