Hermann Hesse

Born on July 2, 1877, in the small Black Forest town of Calw, Württemberg, Hermann Hesse grew up in a household steeped in Pietist missionary zeal, his father had served in India, and his mother was born at a mission station in South India. At fourteen he entered the Evangelical Theological Seminary at the medieval monastery of Maulbronn, but within months his rebellious temperament declared itself: he fled the school, was found in a field a day later, and soon after purchased a revolver and left a suicide note. He survived, abandoned formal education, and worked as a mechanic and bookseller before publishing his first novel, Peter Camenzind (1904), which brought immediate success. Demian (1919), written during a period of psychoanalysis with a student of Jung, explored the divided self that would become his great subject. Siddhartha (1922) drew on the Eastern spiritual traditions his family had transmitted to him, and Steppenwolf (1927) gave the counterculture a sacred text decades before it found its audience. The Glass Bead Game (1943), his last and most ambitious novel, imagined an entire civilization devoted to intellectual synthesis. He became a Swiss citizen in 1923, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946, and spent his final decades in Montagnola, in the Italian-speaking Ticino. He died there on August 9, 1962, in his sleep, of a cerebral hemorrhage, at the age of eighty-five.

After Hesse's suicide attempt in 1892, his parents did not send him back to school. They committed him first to an institution at Stetten for emotionally disturbed children, then to a boys' home in Basel, and only after months of what the staff logged as exemplary behavior was he allowed to return to Calw.