Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse was born in 1877 in Calw, in the Black Forest of Germany, into a family of Protestant missionaries; his mother had been born in India. He was sent to a seminary but ran away and struggled through his school years. He then worked as a mechanic's apprentice in a clock factory and as a bookseller in Tübingen and Basel while writing poetry. His first successful novel, Peter Camenzind (1904), allowed him to write full time. In 1911 he traveled to Southeast Asia. During the First World War he lived in Switzerland and opposed nationalist propaganda, and he worked to help German prisoners of war. A personal crisis led him to psychoanalysis with a student of Carl Jung. His novels Demian (1919), Siddhartha (1922), about a young man in ancient India searching for enlightenment in the time of the Buddha, and Steppenwolf (1927) explore the search for self-knowledge. He became a Swiss citizen in 1924 and lived in Montagnola, in southern Switzerland. The Glass Bead Game appeared in 1943, and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946. He died in Montagnola in 1962.

Hermann Hesse is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Grandson of Protestant missionaries in India; he drew on Hindu and Buddhist thought but called his parents' lived Christianity the strongest influence on him. Source: Wikipedia