Autobiographical Writings – Hermann Hesse (1972) (1st ed)

S$95.00

Autobiographical Writings – Hermann Hesse (1972) (1st ed)

S$95.00

Title: Autobiographical Writings

Author: Hermann Hesse

Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1972. Stated first printing.

Condition: Hardcover, with price-clipped dust jacket. Inscription to endpaper. Else fine.

SKU: hermannhesse Categories: , Tag:

From jacket flap:

Rarely have biography and art been more complexly interwoven than in the life and works of Hermann Hesse. An intensely introspective man, Hesse was obsessed from first to last – from Peter Camenzind to The Glass Bead Game – with the spiritual crises of his life and the broader meanings they suggested for his generation. Inevitably, his readers become as fascinated with the man as with the works themselves. Yet Hesse’s autobiographical writings, which comprise some of his finest prose and stand in explicit counterpoint to the fiction, have not been previously available in English.

The present volume includes twelve revealing pieces arranged so that Hesse narrates his own life in roughly chronological sequence. The first three, dealing primarily with the portrait of the artist as a young man, suggest the experiences that underlie Demian, Beneath the Wheel, and the other novels of youth. In the next group, Hesse describes his journey to India, from which Siddharta eventually emerged, as well as the trauma of the war years. The two long central pieces, A Guest at the Spa and Journey to Nuremberg, recapitulate the process of maturing that turned the mountain recluse of Montagnola into the ironic witness of the twenties, who could write with such humorous detachment about the spiritual torments of the Steppenwolf.

The later writings, which move closer and closer to reflective essay, render in a classically paradigmatic form an account of the highly ordered, virtually Castalian existence that assumed fictional shape in The Glass Bead Game.