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 includedPeter Camenzind(1904),Beneath the Wheel(1906),Gertrud(1910), andRosshalde(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 novelDemian(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), andThe Glass Bead Game(1943). Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. He died in 1962 at the age of eighty-five.
“Sometimes lush and lyrical, sometimes in the simple language of
the parable, these tales elaborate Hesse's concerns with mortality,
the unity of life and the isolation of the artist. . . . Quirky and
evocative, Hesse's fairy tales stand alone, but also amplify the
ideas and utopian longings of such counterculture avatars as
Siddhartha and Steppenwolf.”—Publishers Weekly
“Hesse unerringly creates the feel of a fairy tale. . . . Lay
readers will enjoy this as much as literary specialists.”—Library
Journal
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
