Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow

German-born novelist, painter, and poet Herman Hesse, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1946, has retained a consistently loyal readership in North America. His novels Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and Demian were popular in the mid-Sixties and Seventies and are still in print. However, there's been no substantial English biography of Hesse since 1978, and this latest portrait from Decker, biographer of Francis of Assisi, Vincent van Gogh, Rainer Maria Rilke, among others, will not be superseded for some time. Rather than a meticulously detailed cradle-to-crypt account, Decker fashions a fulsome literary study, quoting extensively from Hesse's poetry and fiction positioned within the context of the author's life. Hesse's troubled childhood and adolescence were direct results of his persistent defiance of his parents' stringent pietist Protestant beliefs and traditions. Consequently, writing became an affirmation of self-reliance and an escape from the problematic real world. This rebellious independence is manifest in his recurring literary motif of the restless seeker or wanderer in search of his true Self and his exploration of Eastern asceticism and spiritualism.