Hayden White is Professor of History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz and author of The Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, and Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Thomas Mann (1875-1955), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, wrote essays as well as some of the great fiction of the twentieth century, including Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Death in Venice, Joseph and His Brothers, and Doctor Faustus.