Hermann Hesse was born in Calw, Germany, in 1877. After a short period at a seminary he moved to Switzerland to work as a bookseller. From 1904 he devoted himself to writing, establishing his reputation with a series of romantic novels. During the First World War he worked for the Red Cross. His later novels - Siddartha (1922), Steppenwolf (1927), Narziss und Goldmund (1930) and Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game, 1943) - poems and critical essays established him as one of the greatest literary figures of the German-speaking world. He won many literary awards including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. Hermann Hesse died in 1962.

The gripping and fascinating story of disease in a man's soul, and a savage indictment of bourgeois society