Hesse’s books weren’t just novels – they were more like religious parables. You didn’t merely read him for entertainment or escapism (though his best books provide a bit of both).

The German-Swiss Nobel Prize winning author Hermann Hesse, who died 50 years ago today, wrote not only novels like Steppenwolf and the Glass Bead Game, but also thousands of letters.

If Pope Benedict XVI really does draw inspiration from Hermann Hesse's Der Steppenwolf, then the famously rigid arch-conservative must have a hitherto unknown secret side. That, as it happens ...

The German-Swiss novelist Hermann Hesse was in a dark place when he wrote Steppenwolf at the age of 50. I was in a dark place when I discovered the book at 14. Something changed in me that year.

Hermann Hesse was 40 years old when his novel Demian was first published in 1919 under the pseudonym Emil Sinclair — a name that clearly was inspired by various references that had played a ...

Hermann Karl Hesse, the German-Swiss poet, author and painter, spent more than 40 years in Montagnola, Switzerland on Lake Lugano. There, he lived in seclusion and wrote his most well-known… ...

Hesse won the Nobel prize for literature and became the most widely read and translated European author of the 20th century with approximately 150 million copies of his works in circulation around ...

In 1922, Hesse’s Siddhartha was published. It aroused a fascination in India like no other German-language novel and has shaped the image of India ever since. The poet, however, set the plot of the ...

Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow, by Gunnar Decker, translated by Peter Lewis (Harvard University Press, 800 pp., $39.95) English-language scholars have contributed almost as much to an ...