The Buddenbrooks Novelist is Thomas Mann, a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate. He is noted for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His most famous work is the novel Buddenbrooks, which chronicles the decline of a wealthy German merchant family over the course of four generations.