Hermann Hesse: Writers for the Seventies

During the late sixties, the America that Herman Hesse thought would never be receptive to his works came alive with the counterculture and Americans began to become aware of Hesse first through Siddhartha and Narcissus and Goldmund. In Herman Hesse, a volume first published in the series Writers for the Seventies, Ed Casebeer makes the claim that American readers need Hesse who believed that the universe makes sense and that the best way to realize that affirmation is to realize yourself. By his novels and by his life, Herman Hesse provided the assurance and guidance of a man who sought himself through eighty-five years of some of the most disastrous events of the past two centuries. This volume contains chapters on four of Hesse’s novels most popular in the counter culture: Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund, and Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game). Together, these novels show an amazing breadth of subjects, situations, characters, themes, and techniques. Yet underlying them all is a unifying theme: the search for self-realization in a harmonious universe. Hesse tells us, “We can understand one another; but each of us is able to interpret himself to himself alone.”