Hermann Hesse

In postwar Germany, a fifty-year-old man Harry Haller is a sad and lonely figure, a reclusive intellectual for whom life holds no joy. He struggles to reconcile the wild primeval wolf and the rational man within himself without surrendering to the bourgeois values he despises. His life changes dramatically when he meets a woman who is his opposite, the carefree and elusive Hermine. The tale of the Steppenwolf culminates in the surreal Magic Theater--For...

Leaving behind the medieval monastary of Mariabronn at the urgings of his instructor, Narcissus, Goldmund embarks on a fantastic journey to recapture his past and discover his future.

"Herman Hesse's spiritual biography, 'Beneath the Wheel, ' is a touchstone in the Nobel Prize-winning author's lifelong examination of the conflict between self-affirmation and self-destruction. Based on his own experience, his second novel attacks an educational system that fosters intelledt and ambition at the expense of emotion, soul and instinct. 'Beneath the Wheel' tells with compassion and tenderness a sstory that is true for our own age, with...

A classic of modern literature, The Journey to the East is a profound rendering of the struggle between faith and despair. The hero, identified only as H.H., recounts a fantastic spiritual and geographic pilgrimage he took years ago with the League, a secret society whose members include the likes of Paul Klee, Mozart, and Baudelaire. Traversing both time and space, the pilgrims come across Noah's Ark in Zurich and meet Don Quixote at Bremgarten,...