[When] I say that Steppenwolf functions as a "bible" I mean that it seems to serve as THE book for certain people, as the one book that says it all, that grabs you and will not let you go, to the point of physical as well as mental commitment. (p. 440) A book that is to produce martyrs or converts among its readers need not show the balance of a genuine "classic," need not fulfill the highest aesthetic standards of harmony and bearing and sublimity…. Common to a "bi...

Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf is a novel of ideas and a novel of character…. It is the delineation of character, after all, that gives a novel the power to stand alone, to resist the aging processes of time, and to appeal to a large audience. This is not to belittle or disparage in any way the ideas involved. For Hesse takes up many of the central problems of our time, problems which have still not been solved…. The hero of Hesse's novel is a middle-aged, middle-class writer and th...

What do the American dissidents see in Hesse? (p. 981) Hesse's works, from the earliest to the latest, are written for and about young people…. Problems of school, of growing up, of finding one's place in the world predominate in most of his novels. When a novel exceptionally deals with an older man, as does Steppenwolf, it is characteristically the problems of rejuvenation, of a second adolescence, that are in the foreground. Only Hesse the novelist is being appropriated by the America...

Existential philosophers argue that man's existence precedes his essence. Unknowingly, the infant is "thrown into existence" at birth; he is awakened to find that he "is." Then, as [Van Cleve] Morris says "… we commence the long slow journey to find our essence." Hermann Hesse in his famous novel Steppenwolf emphasized this very point, "Every created thing has been thrown into the muddy stream of being and may never more swim back again to its s...