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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Freedman say Hesse wrote about?

2. What was Hesse's earliest memory?

3. What does Freedman say about artists at the beginning of his biography of Hesse?

4. What happened to Hesse's career in 1902?

5. What was Hesse's relationship with the works he began to write in Tubingen?

Short Essay Questions

1. With what nationality did Hesse identify?

2. What circles did Hesse enter in Tubingen?

3. What did Hesse get from his trip to India in 1911?

4. Describe Hesse's move to Basel.

5. What is Freedman's stance with regard to the relationship between Hesse's life and works?

6. What was Hesse's social life like in Basel?

7. What was Hesse's arrival in Tubingen like?

8. What was Hesse's health like, and how did it affect his development?

9. Where did Hesse meet his first wife?

10. Describe Hesse's apprenticeship.

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What did the decision to be a writer mean for Hesse as a young man, and how did the identity of the 'writer' clarify his role and responsibilities? How did he see his job as a "writer"? What was he supposed to do? What was he supposed to avoid? Pay particular attention to his relationships with his family and their expectations for his career.

Essay Topic 2

Hesse was an apprentice in a bookshop. What was Hesse's apprenticeship like, and how did he serve his apprenticeship as a writer? Where did he learn his trade, and what was the process of acquiring a trade like for him? Was he encouraged and trained, or did he learn by trial and error on his own? How did he pass his apprenticeship as a writer? When was his apprenticeship finished? What "masterpiece" established him as a writer, no longer an apprentice?

Essay Topic 3

How did Hesse develop as a novelist? What trajectory do his novels trace? What events in his personal life influenced this trajectory? What did he learn as a novelist, and how do his novels reflect an evolution as he acquired various techniques in his writing?

(see the answer keys)

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