Autobiographical Writings Author:Hermann Hesse, Theodore Ziolkowski (Editor), Denver Lindley (Translator) The reader of Hesse's novels who turns to his autobiographical writings will be able to trace the tenuous line between fact and fiction that characterizes Hesse's entire body of work. In these pages we encounter once again Emil Sinclair, Siddhartha, Harry Haller, Goldmund, and Joseph Knecht -- all in the persona of Hermann Hesse himself.... more »
The present volume includes twelve revealing pieces arranged so that Hesse narrates his own life in roughly chronological sequence. The first three, dealing primarily with the portrait of the artist as a young man, suggest the experiences that underlie Demian, Beneath the Wheel, and the other novels of the youth. In the next group, Hesse describes his journey to India, from which Siddhartha eventually emerged, as well as the trauma of the war years. The two long central pieces, A Guest at the Spa and Journey to Nuremberg, recapitulate the process of maturing that turned the mountain recluse of Montagnola into the ironic witness of the twenties, who could write with such humorous detachment about the spiritual torments of the Steppenwolf.
The later writings, which move closer and closer to the reflective essay, render in a classically paradigmatic form an account of the highly ordered, virtually Castalian existence that assumed fictional shape in The Glass Bead Game.« less