Only a few German writers of the twentieth century have enjoyed worldwide acclaim. Undisputably numbered among these are Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, and Hermann Hesse. Hesse's major works have been translated into some thirty-five...

Hermann Hesse, the most widely translated German author of the twentieth century, authored what he liked to call "biographies of the soul." Though many of his best-known works were novels, they were largely autobiographical, and centered recurrently on...

The novels of the German author Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) are lyrical and confessional and are primarily concerned with the relationship between the contemplative, God-seeking individual, often an artist, and his fellow humans. Hermann Hesse was born...

[Hesse's] entire work seems an endless recording of the process of awakening. The very word fascinates him, and in his last work, the monumental Glass Bead Game (1943), published in this country under the title Magister Ludi, we find the protagonist's admission that "awakening was to me a truly magic word, demanding and pressing, consoling and promising." (p. 52) In the early novels, Peter Camenzind and Beneath the Wheel (1906), this "exercise" was still so much shr...

Hesse used romanticism as a tool for the development of a unique approach, leading to a sharp analysis of the self, the meaning of personal identity and the conditions of self-consciousness, which he explores in contemporary terms…. Hesse's postwar novels are concerned with the inner world turned inside out, yielding not only dreams, memories, or hallucinations per se but also the world underlying perception, which is dissolved and recomposed in the self's inner landscape. (p. 44)

In all of his work Hesse has concerned himself with the individual and his quest for meanings in life. For Hesse the forms of the society which surround the individual are meaningless; therefore, the individual becomes the outsider, the Hessean hero who asks, "How shall I live?"… Although, then, the theme of the outsider underlies much of Hesse's work, there are three novels which, it seems to me, stand out as signposts, marking the direction of Hesse's thinking in terms o...