The novels of the German author Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) are lyrical and confessional and are primarily concerned with the relationship between the contemplative, God-seeking individual, often an artist, and his fellow humans.

Hermann Hesse was born on June 2, 1877, in Calw, Württemberg. His father worked for the publishing house directed by his maternal grandfather, Hermann Gundert, a scholarly Orientalist. Both his parents, as well as his grandfather, had seen service as missionaries with the Basel Mission in the East Indies. The atmosphere in which Hesse grew up was therefore pious, but the household was nonetheless an educated one and relatively urbane.

In 1893 Hesse won a scholarship to the Protestant Theological Seminary at Maulbronn; but he soon rebelled against the intellectual and clerical discipline there and ran away. This experience of flight was evidently of decisive significance in his imaginative development, and it recurs in one form or...