Hermann Hesse, the most widely translated German author of the twentieth century, authored what he liked to call "biographies of the soul." Though many of his best-known works were novels, they were largely autobiographical, and centered recurrently on one man's search for spiritual enlightenment. The works Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and Magister Ludi are Hesse's masterpieces, and draw heavily upon Eastern philosophies and religions in their heroes' quest toward a more divine state. Of German extraction, Hesse spent much of his adult life in Switzerland, enjoying varying degrees of commercial and critical success during a prolific six-decade career. He was awarded the 1946 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Hesse was born in Calw, a town in the southern German state of Württemberg, near the border of the Black Forest, on July 2, 1877. His maternal grandfather, Hermann Gundert, ran a publishing house in Calw that specialized in the literature of Pietism, a...