Hermann Hesse books

Anthologies

Non-Fiction

Short Story Collections

Standalone Novels

Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) was born in Calw, Germany, into a family of missionaries and scholars. He left seminary as a teenager and educated himself through voracious reading, eventually becoming one of the most widely read German-language authors of the twentieth century. He became a Swiss citizen in 1924 and spent much of his life in the village of Montagnola in southern Switzerland.

Hesse’s fiction frequently centers on solitary protagonists searching for meaning outside conventional society. His early novels like Peter Camenzind (1904) and Beneath the Wheel (1906) draw on his own rebellious youth and disillusionment with institutional education. Later works such as Demian (1919) and Siddhartha (1922) reflect his growing interest in Jungian psychology and Eastern philosophy. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946, and his books found a huge new readership during the counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s.