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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What happened in Hesse's family in 1916?

2. What did Hesse win in 1946?

3. What began to replace Hesse's work after "Siddhartha"?

4. How was "On Toward Peace" altered?

5. Where was the house Hesse rented in Ostermundigen located?

Short Essay Questions

1. Describe the progress of Hesse's relationship with Ninon Dolbin.

2. How did Hesse react to the end of the war in Europe?

3. What was Hesse's experience with psychoanalysis?

4. How did Hesse's marriage to Ruth progress?

5. What was Hesse's social position by the mid-to-late 1920s?

6. Describe the period when Hesse's marriage began to crumble.

7. How does Freedman say that Hesse's writing and his life paralleled each other?

8. Describe Hesse's last years and death.

9. Describe Hesse's travels in 1928-1929.

10. What does Freedman say Hesse represented with "Steppenwolf"?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What role did rebellion play in Hesse's life and development as a writer? How important was his brother's running away to music school? What fights did he fight by rebelling, and what fights did he avoid by running away? To what was he opposed? To what was he drawn? How did he learn to use fight or flight as strategies for getting what he wanted? How did these strategies change as he matured?

Essay Topic 2

How did Hesse develop as a novelist? What trajectory do his novels trace? What events in his personal life influenced this trajectory? What did he learn as a novelist, and how do his novels reflect an evolution as he acquired various techniques in his writing?

Essay Topic 3

Describe Hesse's relationship with his parents and family. Why didn't they get along? What traits of Hesse's strained their relationship, even from his childhood? What traits of his parents contributed to a strained relationship? How did Hesse's works, marriages, and decisions change the nature of that relationship over time?

(see the answer keys)

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