'Why must I feel that almost all--no, all--of the devices and conventions used by art are today only fit for parody?' Adrian Leverkühn is a composer who, at terrible personal cost, makes the breakthrough from traditional art to extreme modernism and success. Creative and brilliant, he will stop at nothing to achieve greatness. Thomas Mann wrote Doctor Faustus (1947) in American exile during and just after the Second World War.

A prominent and long-standing defender of democracy, he sought to understand, in cultural and intellectual terms, how Germany had succumbed to Nazism. Mann structures his story through references to the German legend of Faust and his pact with the Devil. The life of the solitary composer, an ultimately tragic figure, is recounted by his friend and biographer, who represents a sadly ineffectual humanism, and whose social activities provide a panorama of middle-class German society in the early twentieth century.

Ritchie Robertson's new English translation is accompanied by detailed annotations and an introduction illuminating the themes of the novel.