Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps--a community devoted exclusively to sickness--as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality.
Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, G. K. Chesterton, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alexandre Dumas, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. M. Forster, Thomas Hardy, Hermann Hesse, James Joyce, Jack London, H.P. Lovecraft, Lucy Maud Montgomery, EDGAR ALLAN POE, Marcel Proust, William Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, William Somerset Maugham, Herman Melville, George Sand, Mary Shelley, Walter Scott, Leo Tolstoy & Bram Stoker
Upton Sinclair, W. Somerset Maugham, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Mann, Rebecca West, H. G. Wellls, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, H. P. Lovecraft, Rabindranath Tagore, Herman Melville, Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, D. H. Lawrence, Bram Stoker, Sir Walter Scott & Jack London
James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, H. P. Lovecraft, Marcel Proust, Herman Melville, EDGAR ALLAN POE, Bram Stoker, Leo Tolstoy, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Stendhal, Rabindranath Tagore, Jack London, Mary Shelley, George Sand, William Somerset Maugham, Walter Scott, Upton Sinclair, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift & Rebecca West
Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Franz Kafka, H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Mark Twain, James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Edith Wharton, Rudyard Kipling, Guy de Maupassant, Kate Chopin, Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, Anton Chekhov, George Eliot, Stephen Crane, Thomas Mann, Alexander Pushkin, Voltaire, Nikolai Gogol, Arthur Conan Doyle, Gustave Flaubert & Jules Verne
Wolfgang von Goethe, Hermann Hesse, Heinrich Heine, The Brothers Grimm, Kurt Tucholsky, Erich Kästner, Ilse Frapan, Martin Suter, Peter Stamm, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Schnitzler, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Böll, Helene Stökl, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Joseph Roth, Peter Rosegger, Wolfdietrich Schnurre & Ernst Anschütz
Rabindranath Tagore, Mark Twain, D. H. Lawrence, Rudyard Kipling, H. P. Lovecraft, Marcel Proust, Upton Sinclair, George Sand, W. Somerset Maugham, Edgar Allan Poe, James Joyce, Herman Melville, Jules Verne, Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, Thomas Mann, May Sinclair & Rebecca West
