Both of his parents served with a Basel Mission to India, where Hesse's mother, Marie Gundert, was born in 1842.

Hermann Hesse was born on July 2, 1877, in the Black Forest town of Calw in Württemberg, Germany, to a Christian missionary family. Hesse was concerned with the dominant themes of modernism-the loss of cultural consensus, the growing anomie of the individual, the spiritual void of post-Christian Europe-yet believed that an inner quest and the resources of Eastern spirituality provided an alternative to existential despair on one hand and militant nationalism on the other. In fact, Hesse's novels are often used by students of the German language because of their simple elegance and accessible style (although his final novel, The Glass Bead Game, is notoriously challenging within his oeuvre). The novel was praised by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, because it 'exposes the problem of modernity's isolated and self-isolating man.' Hesse's interest in Eastern religion and Chinese philosophy, following a journey to India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia, led to the publication of Siddhartha, a fictional account of a young man's journey toward enlightenment during the time of Buddha, and one of his best-loved novels.Īlthough Hesse collaborated closely with a number of contemporary German writers, among them Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Romain Rolland, his prose is neither as dense nor experimental as many modernists. Hesse's interests in self-understanding and spiritual realization were explored in the genre-expanding Steppenwolf, which fused dreamlike awareness and Jungian psychology with realism.

As a young man, Hesse was an eager student of nineteenth century Romanticism, admitting his immense debt to major Romantic novelists and poets such as Goethe and Hölderlin.

Hesse gained a wide readership for his lyrical explorations of spirituality and psychology in a time when other modernists were describing the dread, alienation, and absurdity of modern industrial society. Hermann Hesse ( ) (J– August 9, 1962) was a Nobel Prize–winning German- Swiss novelist and poet.

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