Hermann Hesse
1877–1962 2 entries
Biography
Hermann Hesse was a German-born Swiss poet and novelist whose books about the search for the self have been read by generations of young people. Born in 1877 in Calw in the Black Forest, into a family of missionaries, he ran away from a seminary at fourteen and later worked as a bookseller in Tübingen and Basel while writing his first books. His early success, the novel Peter Camenzind, allowed him to live from his writing.
During the First World War he opposed the nationalism around him, and after a personal crisis and psychoanalysis he wrote Demian, followed by Siddhartha, the story of a young man’s path to wisdom in the India of the Buddha, and Steppenwolf. In 1919 he settled in Montagnola in Ticino, and in 1924 he became a Swiss citizen. His last great novel, The Glass Bead Game, appeared in 1943, and in 1946 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in Montagnola in 1962.
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