a high order.”
“Almost all the prose works I have written are biographies of the soul,” Hesse asserted, “monologues in which a single individual is observed in relation to the world and to his own ego.” Exploring the oriental religious concepts that became central to his work, he wrote Siddhartha (1922; translated into English in 1951), which recounts the spiritual evolution of a man living in India at the time of Buddha. Perhaps more than any other of his novels, Siddhartha reflects Hesse’s belief that “the true profession of man is to find his way himself.” “For me, Siddhartha is a more potent medicine than the New Testament,” said Henry Miller; Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., deemed it Hesse’s “simplest, clearest, most innocent tale of seeking and finding.”
Hesse again utilized the tools of psychoanalysis in Der Steppenwolf‘(1927’; translated as Steppenwolf in 1929), a novel that probes the “two souls” of a reclusive intellectual whose animalistic urges strive for release. Inspired by the dissolute aftermath of Hesse’s failed second marriage to a much younger woman, it is arguably his most autobiographical book, one hailed by The New York Times as “a savage indictment of bourgeois society.” Hesse pursued similar themes in Narziss und Goldmund (1930; translated as Narcissus and Goldmund 1968) by presenting parallel biographies of an ascetic monk and a rapturous man of the world. Thomas Mann called Narcissus and Goldmund “a poetic novel unique in its purity and fascination.” The New York Times Book Review agreed. “What makes this short book so limitlessly vast is the body-and-soul-shaking debate that runs through it, which it has the honesty and courage not to resolve: between the flesh and the spirit, art and scientific or religious speculation, action and contemplation, between the wayfaring and the sedentary in us.”
In 1931, Hesse married for a third time and moved to a new home in Montagnola. His happiness is reflected in Die Morgenlandfahrt (1932; translated as The Journey to the East m 1957), a personal fairy tale in which he reaffirms his belief in the superiority of the realms of art and thought. With Hitler’s rise to power, Hesse (by then a Swiss citizen) began harboring Jewish refugees and blacklisted artists fleeing the Third Reich. Soon his work was declared “undesirable” in Nazi Germany. In 1932 he started writing the futuristic novel that endures as his magnum opus. Published in 1943, Das Glasperlenspiel (translated as The Glass Bead Game in 1969) takes place in the year 2400 in a Utopian land where artists and intellectuals strive to attain “perfection, pure being, the fullness of reality.” “The sublime work of [Hesse’s] old age, The Glass Bead Game [is] drawn from all sources of human culture, both East and West,” observed Thomas Mann. “This chaste and daring work, full of fantasy and at the same time highly intellectual, is full of tradition, loyalty, memory, secrecy—without being in the least derivative.” Admired as well by T. S. Eliot and André Gide, it is widely seen as the key to a full understanding of Hesse’s thought.
Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. Krieg und Frieden, his lifelong reflections on war and politics, came out the same year; in 1971 it appeared in English as If the War Goes On. One of Europe’s grand old men of letters, Hesse spent his final years in seclusion at Montagnola compiling volumes of his poetry, essays, and correspondence. Unaware that he was suffering from leukemia, Hermann Hesse died in his sleep from a cerebral hemorrhage on August 9, 1962. “The entire work of Hesse is a poetic effort for emancipation,” said André Gide. “In each of [his books] I refind the same indecision of soul; its contours are illusive and its aspirations, infinite.” Hesse’s longtime friend and countryman Thomas Mann remarked, “For me his lifework, with its roots in native German romanticism, for all its occasional strange individualism, its now humorously petulant and now mystically yearning estrangement from the world and the times, belongs to the highest and purest spiritual aspirations and labors of our epoch.”
Hesse’s call for self-realization coupled with his celebration of Eastern mysticism earned him a huge following among America’s counterculture in the decade after his death. “Rarely, since a generation of young Europeans decked themselves out in the blue frock coat and yellow vest of Goethe’s Werther, has the youth culture of an age responded so rapturously to a writer,” observed the Hesse scholar Theodore Ziolkowski in 1973. Hesse “is deeply loved by those among the American young who