Hermann Hesse was born in Claw, Germany in 1877. As a child he lived for a time in Basle. He spent a short period studying at a seminary in Germany but soon left to work as a bookseller in Switzerland. From 1904 he devoted himself to writing. After a first volume of verse (1899), Hesse established his reputation with a series of lyrical romantic novels - Peter Camenzind (1904), Unterm Rad (1906) Gertrud (1910) and the short story, Knulp (1915).
After a visit to India in 1911 he moved to Switzerland and worked for the Red Cross during the First World War. He was denounced in Germany and settled permanently in Switzerland, where he established himself as one of the greatest literary figures of the German-speaking world. His humanity, his searching philosophy developed further in such novels as Siddartha (1922), Der Steppenwolf (1927), Narziss und Goldmund (1930) and Das Glasperlenspeil (1943), while his poems and critical writings won him a leading place among contemporary thinkers. Hesse won many literary awards, including the Nobel Prize in 1946. He died in 1962, shortly after his eighty-fifth birthday.
Thomas Mann said of him 'For me his lifework, with its roots in native German romanticism, for all its occasional strange individualism, its now humorously petulant and now mystically yearning estrangement from the world and the times, belongs to the highest and purest spiritual aspirations and labours of our epoch.'
