In the Library
Steppenwolf
Hermann Hesse, 1929
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 5.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Basil Creighton
- Chapters
- Chapters 9
- Length
- Length 75k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
For madmen only, and one price only--your mind.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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About the book
Somewhere on a wall in a grey northern city a sign flickers into being: Magic Theatre, for madmen only, and the price is your mind. Harry Haller, a greying intellectual lodging in a tidy bourgeois house he both reveres and can't stop sneering at, has spent years certain he is two creatures sharing one skin: the man who weeps at Mozart and the wolf of the steppes who would tear the whole comfortable world to pieces. Hesse lets that diagnosis stand just long enough to take it away. Hermine, a dancer who refuses to treat his despair as sacred, teaches him to waltz, to laugh, to suspect his sharpest self is not his only one. The book's quiet, devastating claim is that no one is two natures; everyone is a thousand, and to call yourself a single type is to lock the rest of yourself in a cell you furnished. Read it the next time you have decided which animal you are.