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Steppenwolf

Author Hermann Hesse
Afterword by David Horrocks
Translated by David Horrocks
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Paperback
$18.00 US
Penguin Adult HC/TR | Penguin Classics
On sale Mar 04, 2025 | 256 Pages | 9780143137825
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Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse’s iconic countercultural novel about the search for authenticity in an inauthentic world, in a new translation

A Penguin Classic

At first glance, Harry Haller seems like a respectable, educated man. In reality, he is the Steppenwolf: wild, strange, alienated from society, and repulsed by the modern age. But as he is drawn into a series of dreamlike and sometimes savage encounters—accompanied by, among others, Mozart, Goethe, and the bewitching Hermione—the misanthropic Haller undergoes a spiritual, even psychedelic, journey, and ultimately discovers a higher truth and the possibility of happiness.

This blistering portrait of a man who feels himself to be half human and half wolf was the bible of the 1960s counterculture, capturing the mood of a disaffected generation. It continues to resonate as a haunting story of estrangement, redemption, and the search for one’s place in the world.
Hermann Hesse was born in 1877 in Calw, Germany. He was the son and grandson of Protestant missionaries and was educated in religious schools until the age of thirteen, when he dropped out of school. At age eighteen he moved to Basel, Switzerland, to work as a bookseller and lived in Switzerland for most of his life. His early novels included Peter Camenzind (1904), Beneath the Wheel (1906), Gertrud (1910), and Rosshalde (1914). During this period Hesse married and had three sons. During World War I Hesse worked to supply German prisoners of war with reading materials and expressed his pacifist leanings in anti-war tracts and novels. Hesse's lifelong battles with depression drew him to study Freud during this period and, later, to undergo analysis with Jung. His first major literary success was the novel Demian (1919). When Hesse's first marriage ended, he moved to Montagnola, Switzerland, where he created his best-known works: Siddhartha (1922), Steppenwolf (1927), Narcissus and Goldmund (1930), Journey to the East (1932), and The Glass Bead Game (1943). Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. He died in 1962 at the age of eighty-five. View titles by Hermann Hesse

About

Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse’s iconic countercultural novel about the search for authenticity in an inauthentic world, in a new translation

A Penguin Classic

At first glance, Harry Haller seems like a respectable, educated man. In reality, he is the Steppenwolf: wild, strange, alienated from society, and repulsed by the modern age. But as he is drawn into a series of dreamlike and sometimes savage encounters—accompanied by, among others, Mozart, Goethe, and the bewitching Hermione—the misanthropic Haller undergoes a spiritual, even psychedelic, journey, and ultimately discovers a higher truth and the possibility of happiness.

This blistering portrait of a man who feels himself to be half human and half wolf was the bible of the 1960s counterculture, capturing the mood of a disaffected generation. It continues to resonate as a haunting story of estrangement, redemption, and the search for one’s place in the world.

Author

Hermann Hesse was born in 1877 in Calw, Germany. He was the son and grandson of Protestant missionaries and was educated in religious schools until the age of thirteen, when he dropped out of school. At age eighteen he moved to Basel, Switzerland, to work as a bookseller and lived in Switzerland for most of his life. His early novels included Peter Camenzind (1904), Beneath the Wheel (1906), Gertrud (1910), and Rosshalde (1914). During this period Hesse married and had three sons. During World War I Hesse worked to supply German prisoners of war with reading materials and expressed his pacifist leanings in anti-war tracts and novels. Hesse's lifelong battles with depression drew him to study Freud during this period and, later, to undergo analysis with Jung. His first major literary success was the novel Demian (1919). When Hesse's first marriage ended, he moved to Montagnola, Switzerland, where he created his best-known works: Siddhartha (1922), Steppenwolf (1927), Narcissus and Goldmund (1930), Journey to the East (1932), and The Glass Bead Game (1943). Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. He died in 1962 at the age of eighty-five. View titles by Hermann Hesse

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