Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf is a novel of ideas and a novel of character…. It is the delineation of character, after all, that gives a novel the power to stand alone, to resist the aging processes of time, and to appeal to a large audience. This is not to belittle or disparage in any way the ideas involved. For Hesse takes up many of the central problems of our time, problems which have still not been solved….

The hero of Hesse's novel is a middle-aged, middle-class writer and thinker named Harry Haller. A free-lance journalist by profession, Haller is certainly not the average man of his class or even of his group. His questioning, skeptical intelligence leads him to close examination of the affairs of the intellect and to art, music, and philosophy. Furthermore, the folly of attempting to separate the ideas from the novel itself is at once...