"...from my thirteenth year on, it was clear to me that I wanted to be a poet or nothing at all." - Hermann Hesse

Introduction
The German/Swiss novelist, poet, painter and Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse was born in Calw, Württemberg in Germany's Black Forest on July 2, 1877. He spent his formative years in Calw, Göppingen, Cannstatt, and Basel, Switzerland, where his missionary father worked for a time. In 1901 Hesse undertook his first of two Italian journeys. (He would later live in the Swiss-Italian province of Ticino.) He also traveled to India (1911), a trip that influenced several of his works, particularly Siddharta (1922).

Although he wrote in German, Hesse spent most of his life living outside of Germany in Italian Switzerland. He rebelled against the traditional Protestant education his father wanted for him, and he was for a short time an apprentice with a clockmaker and later a bookseller. Following a nervous breakdown, he underwent pschoanalysis with Carl Jung in Switzerland (1921). Hesse reestablished his Swiss citizenship in 1924. He married three times, his last wife being the art historian Ninon Doblin Ausländer. He and Ninon lived in Montagnola, in Ticino, Switzerland. After 1939 Hesse's books were banned in Nazi Germany, but he continued to publish in Switzerland. In 1946 Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the 1960s Hesse—in English translation—became a trendy author among American college students. His works include:

• Peter Camenzind (1904, novel)
• On the Road/Unterwegs (1911, poems)
• Demian (1919, novel)
• Siddharta (1922, novel)
• Der Steppenwolf (1927, novel)
• Narziss und Goldmund (1930, novel)
• Poems/Die Gedichte (1942, full edition of Hesse's poetry)
• The Glass Bead Game/Magister Ludi/Glasperlenspiel (1943, novel)

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