Hermann A Pictorial Biography offers a wealth of unknown photographic and textual material which was first discovered among Hesse's literary effects after his death. Over 200 photographs chronicle his family background, his school and apprentice years, his first literary efforts and initial successes, his travels to India and throughout Europe, his continuing growth as a writer. These photographs, apart from illustrating Hesse's long and varied life, amply document his position in the cultural life of his time and his relationships with celebrated contemporaries. The photographs are accompanied by a brief text prepared by Volker Michels, a leading Hesse scholar, which includes comments about Hesse from such writers as Thomas Mann, Martin Buber, T.S. Eliot, and Andre Gide, examples of Hesse's unpublished light verse, and a detailed chronological table. Hesse's own essay "Life Story Briefly Told" serves as an introduction. Together, text and pictures provide the Hesse reader with new tools to interpret and evaluate the life and works of this exceptional man and artist.
Author
Many works, including Siddhartha (1922) and Steppenwolf (1927), of German-born Swiss writer Hermann Hesse concern the struggle of the individual to find wholeness and meaning in life; he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946. Other best-known works of this poet, novelist, and painter include The Glass Bead Game , which, also known as Magister Ludi, explore a search of an individual for spirituality outside society. In his time, Hesse was a popular and influential author in the German-speaking world; worldwide fame only came later. Young Germans desiring a different and more "natural" way of life at the time of great economic and technological progress in the country, received enthusiastically Peter Camenzind , first great novel of Hesse. Throughout Germany, people named many schools. In 1964, people founded the Calwer Hermann-Hesse-Preis, awarded biennially, alternately to a German-language literary journal or to the translator of work of Hesse to a foreign language. The city of Karlsruhe, Germany, also associates a Hermann Hesse prize.
