Hermann Hesse was born in Calw, Germany in 1877. After a short period at a seminary he moved to Switzerland to work as a bookseller. From 1904 he devoted himself to writing, establishing his reputation with a series of romantic novels. During the First World War he worked for the Red Cross and afterwards, consolidated his position as a leading contemporary thinker. Hesse won many literary awards including the Nobel Prize in 1946. He died in 1962 at the age of eighty-five.

STEPPENWOLF is a poetical self-portrait of a man who felt himself to be half-human and half-wolf. This Faust-like and magical story is evidence of Hesse's searching philosophy and extraordinary sense of humanity as he tells of the humanization of a middle-aged misanthrope. Yet this novel can also be seen as a plea for rigorous self-examination and an indictment of the intellectual hypocrisy of the period. As Hesse himself remarked, 'Of all my books STEPPENWOLF is the one that was more often and more violently misunderstood than any other'.