Steppenwolf

Harry Haller is fifty years old, educated, cultivated, and in the grip of a despair he cannot name or escape. He believes himself to be divided between the human — the part that values culture, friendship, and music — and the Steppenwolf — the wild, isolated, violent part that scorns the comfortable mediocrity of bourgeois existence. This division is, he believes, irreconcilable. Then he meets Hermine.

Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf was published in 1927 and adopted as a counterculture classic in the 1960s — a generation found in Harry Haller’s crisis their own estrangement from a society that seemed to have no place for inner life. But the novel’s power transcends any particular moment. It is a precise and unflinching account of what it feels like to be intelligent and isolated and convinced that you see the world more clearly than the world would like.

The famous Magic Theatre sequence — ‘For Madmen Only: Price of Admission Your Mind’ — is one of the most extraordinary set pieces in modern fiction. A novel that changes people. Basil Creighton’s translation. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.