Profile
Hermann Hesse: The Novelist of the Inner Journey
Nobel Prize-winning German-Swiss writer, born in Calw on 2 July 1877
Hesse came into the world on 2 July 1877 in Calw, a Black Forest town, in a family of missionaries. A rebellious student, he ran away from a seminary as a teenager.
He worked as a bookseller before his first novel, Peter Camenzind, made him successful. After a personal crisis during the First World War, he moved to Switzerland and wrote Demian, Siddhartha and Steppenwolf.
His final novel, The Glass Bead Game, imagines a future community devoted to intellectual play. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946 and spent his last decades in the Swiss village of Montagnola.
Career highlights
- 1877Born in Calw, Germany
- 1891Leaves the seminary: after rebelling against strict schooling
- 1904Peter Camenzind: first successful novel
- 1919Demian: published under a pen name
- 1922Siddhartha: tale of spiritual awakening
- 1927Steppenwolf: his most famous novel
- 1943The Glass Bead Game: his final novel
- 1946Nobel Prize in Literature
- 1962Dies in Montagnola: Switzerland
Did you know?He first published Demian under the pen name Emil Sinclair, the name of its narrator.
