Steppenwolf

Hermann Hesse was born in Calw, Wurttemburg in 1877. In 1919, as a protest against German militarism in the First World War, Hesse moved to Switzerland where he lived in self-imposed exile until his death at the age of eighty-five in 1962. His major works include Steppenwolf, Siddharta and Narcissus and Goldmund. Hesse worked on his magnum opus, The Glass Bead Game, for twelve years. This novel was specifically cited when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. Hesse died in 1962.

A new translation by David Horrocks. At first sight Harry Haller seems like a respectable, educated man. In reality he is the Steppenwolf: wild, strange, alienated from society and repulsed by the modern age. But as he is drawn into a series of dreamlike and sometimes savage encounters - accompanied by, among others, Mozart, Goethe and the bewitching Hermione - the misanthropic Haller discovers a higher truth, and the possibility of happiness. This haunting portrayal of a man who feels he is half-human and half-wolf became a counterculture classic for a disaffected generation. Yet it is also a story of redemption, and an intricately-structured modernist masterpiece. This is the first new translation of Steppenwolf for over eighty years, returning to the fresh, authentic language of Hesse's original.