Buddenbrooks, novel by Thomas Mann, published in 1901 in two volumes in German as Buddenbrooks, Verfall einer Familie (“Buddenbrooks, the Decline of a Family”). The work was Mann’s first novel, and it expressed the ambivalence of his feelings about the value of the life of the artist as opposed to ordinary, bourgeois life. The novel is the saga of the fall of the Buddenbrooks, a family of merchants, from the pinnacle of their material wealth in 1835 to their extinction in 1877.