Acceding to the pleas of their wayward and truculent son, Hesse's parents finally permitted him to return home in the autumn of 1893. He spent the next six months gardening, assisting his father in the publishing house, and reading avidly in his grandfather's library. In early June 1894, after his father had denied him permission to leave home to prepare himself for a literary career, Hesse became an apprentice machinist in Calw. This was a trade, he believed, that would afford him a livelihood, that he could some day ply abroad, and that would permit him ample time for his literary interests. Fifteen months of grimy labor disabused the young dreamer of his romantic notions. In October 1895 he began a more appropriate apprenticeship in a bookshop in Tübingen.
Hesse's four years in Tübingen were relatively tranquil. He continued to be a lonely outsider, applying himself diligently in the bookshop and otherwise preoccupied with his writing and self-education. During his preceding two years in Calw he had steeped himself in the German literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; in Tübingen he continued his prodigious reading but narrowed its scope drastically.
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