Hermann Hesse

Hesse was born into a family of Pietist missionaries in Swabia and rebelled early against its strict religiosity: expelled from a seminary at fourteen after running away, and hospitalized following a suicide attempt, an adolescent crisis that left the theme of the divided, self-destructive soul at the center of everything he later wrote. He trained instead as a bookseller in Tübingen and Basel before turning to writing full time.

A committed pacifist, he was vilified in Germany during the First World War for his antiwar essays and eventually settled permanently in Switzerland, taking citizenship there in 1923. In the early 1920s he underwent Jungian analysis, an experience that shaped the interior architecture of Demian and, later, Steppenwolf (1927). Siddhartha (1922) drew on his own family's missionary ties to India and a fascination with Eastern philosophy. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946 and died in Montagnola, Switzerland, in 1962.