What do the American dissidents see in Hesse? (p. 981)

Hesse's works, from the earliest to the latest, are written for and about young people…. Problems of school, of growing up, of finding one's place in the world predominate in most of his novels. When a novel exceptionally deals with an older man, as does Steppenwolf, it is characteristically the problems of rejuvenation, of a second adolescence, that are in the foreground. Only Hesse the novelist is being appropriated by the American dissidents. The poet, the essayist, even the short-story writer, have so far been ignored.

Rebellion is another principal theme. All of Hesse's major characters are alienated outsiders…. As their creator did in life, many of them make the school a target of their dissatisfaction. Beneath the Wheel is only the fullest and most obvious of these treatments, a novel in which Hesse frequently speaks with his own...