![]() ![]() The story in large part reflects a profound crisis in Hesse's spiritual world during the 1920s. The novel was named after the German name for the steppe wolf. Originally published in Germany in 1927, it was first translated into English in 1929. Steppenwolf (originally Der Steppenwolf) is the tenth novel by German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse. Hermann Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946 (for a body of work that includes The Steppenwolf, Siddhartha and Narcissus and Goldmund,) and this new 2023 translation gives readers a fresh take on a nearly 100-year-old modern classic. It is ingeniously plotted, where the plot folds in on itself, and reads like a feverish, hallucinatory (drug-induced?) dream of a man in spiritual crisis and despair. With doses of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, it is a philosophical, introspective novel, with forays into the role of art and music in modern life. Its protagonist, Harry Haller (Hermann Hesse?) is a man struggling to reconcile his two selves, and in his search for enlightenment and self-discovery confronts the chaos of his own soul, coming face-to-face with “life’s shallowness, its hopeless sadness, its fathomless darkness.” With its anti-war slant, its harsh critique of conventional, bourgeois life, and its large dose of sex and drugs, The Steppenwolf, written in 1927, became a huge bestseller and a counterculture classic in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The Steppenwolf is Hermann Hesse’s brilliant novel of modern alienation. ![]()
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