This selection of Thomas Mann's letters, first published in a Vintage edition in 1975, spans sixty-six years from the first, written by a precocious fourteen-year-old, to the last, composed on his deathbed by the eighty-year-old Nobel Laureate, and includes letters to family and to such celebrated contemporaries as Gide, Freud, Brecht, Einstein, Hesse, Schoenberg, and Adorno. Covering two world wars and exile in Europe and America, Mann's letters offer the reader insight into the concerns and values of one of the great writers of our time.