The counterculture classic, a surrealist masterpiece about a man who believes his life is irredeemable until he ventures into the world of pleasure, by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Siddhartha.
To the outside world, Harry Haller is a reserved intellectual: quietly renting an upstairs room from a respectable family, he spends his days alone in miserable contemplation. But on the inside, Harry is the Steppenwolf, half man and half wolf, trapped between a disdain for the regulated lives of respectable people and an inability to embrace the pleasures of the senses.
As he begins to confront the life he's spent in self-imposed isolation, Harry meets the mysterious Hermine and becomes captivated by her ease of moving through the world. Hermine becomes Harry's guide through the decadent underbelly of their city, and his teacher in the ways of the pleasure-seeking bourgeois society he's always despised. Through a series of surreal encounters with the likes of Mozart and Goethe, Harry begins to find that the world of desire is the key to unlocking the life he once thought irredeemable.
Hermann Hesse was born in 1877 in Calw, Germany. He was the son and grandson of Protestant missionaries and was educated in religious schools until the age of thirteen, when he dropped out of school. At age eighteen he moved to Basel, Switzerland, to work as a bookseller and lived in Switzerland for most of his life. His early novels included Peter Camenzind (1904), Beneath the Wheel (1906), Gertrud (1910), and Rosshalde (1914). During this period Hesse married and had three sons.
During World War I Hesse worked to supply German prisoners of war with reading materials and expressed his pacifist leanings in anti-war tracts and novels. Hesse's lifelong battles with depression drew him to study Freud during this period and, later, to undergo analysis with Jung. His first major literary success was the novel Demian (1919).
When Hesse's first marriage ended, he moved to Montagnola, Switzerland, where he created his best-known works: Siddhartha (1922), Steppenwolf (1927), Narcissus and Goldmund (1930), Journey to the East (1932), and The Glass Bead Game (1943). Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. He died in 1962 at the age of eighty-five.
View titles by Hermann Hesse
The counterculture classic, a surrealist masterpiece about a man who believes his life is irredeemable until he ventures into the world of pleasure, by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Siddhartha.
To the outside world, Harry Haller is a reserved intellectual: quietly renting an upstairs room from a respectable family, he spends his days alone in miserable contemplation. But on the inside, Harry is the Steppenwolf, half man and half wolf, trapped between a disdain for the regulated lives of respectable people and an inability to embrace the pleasures of the senses.
As he begins to confront the life he's spent in self-imposed isolation, Harry meets the mysterious Hermine and becomes captivated by her ease of moving through the world. Hermine becomes Harry's guide through the decadent underbelly of their city, and his teacher in the ways of the pleasure-seeking bourgeois society he's always despised. Through a series of surreal encounters with the likes of Mozart and Goethe, Harry begins to find that the world of desire is the key to unlocking the life he once thought irredeemable.
Author
Hermann Hesse was born in 1877 in Calw, Germany. He was the son and grandson of Protestant missionaries and was educated in religious schools until the age of thirteen, when he dropped out of school. At age eighteen he moved to Basel, Switzerland, to work as a bookseller and lived in Switzerland for most of his life. His early novels included Peter Camenzind (1904), Beneath the Wheel (1906), Gertrud (1910), and Rosshalde (1914). During this period Hesse married and had three sons.
During World War I Hesse worked to supply German prisoners of war with reading materials and expressed his pacifist leanings in anti-war tracts and novels. Hesse's lifelong battles with depression drew him to study Freud during this period and, later, to undergo analysis with Jung. His first major literary success was the novel Demian (1919).
When Hesse's first marriage ended, he moved to Montagnola, Switzerland, where he created his best-known works: Siddhartha (1922), Steppenwolf (1927), Narcissus and Goldmund (1930), Journey to the East (1932), and The Glass Bead Game (1943). Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. He died in 1962 at the age of eighty-five.
View titles by Hermann Hesse
