This treatise, cited in full in the novel's text as Harry reads it, addresses Harry by name and strikes him as describing himself uncannily. In his aimless wanderings about the city he encounters a person carrying an advertisement for a magic theatre who gives him a small book, Treatise on the Steppenwolf. The title of this "real" book-within-the-book is Harry Haller's Records (For Madmen Only).Īs the story begins, the hero is beset by reflections on his being ill-suited for the world of everyday, regular people, specifically for frivolous bourgeois society. The acquaintance adds a short preface of his own and then has the manuscript published. The book is presented as a manuscript written by its protagonist, a middle-aged man named Harry Haller, who leaves it to a chance acquaintance, the nephew of his landlady. was inspired by Bechet's playing" Plot summary Tracy, professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, writes, "the character of Pablo.
In 1926, Hesse also became acquainted with jazz music, attending Swiss performances of the Revue Nègre featuring Josephine Baker and Sidney Bechet Steven C. The first English edition, translated by Basil Creighton, was published in 1929 by Martin Secker in the United Kingdom and by Henry Holt and Company in the United States. In 1926, he published a precursor to the book, a collection of poems titled The Crisis: From Hermann Hesse's Diary. Hesse began writing Steppenwolf in Basel, and finished it in Zürich. The resulting feeling of isolation and inability to make lasting contact with the outside world led to increasing despair and the return of Hesse's suicidal thoughts. After a short trip to Germany with Wenger, Hesse stopped seeing her almost completely. Upon his return, he rented a separate apartment, adding to his isolation. After several weeks, however, he left Basel, only returning near the end of the year. In 1924, Hermann Hesse married singer Ruth Wenger. Steppenwolf was wildly popular and has been a perpetual success across the decades, but Hesse later asserted that the book was largely misunderstood.
The story in large part reflects a profound crisis in Hesse's spiritual world during the 1920s. The novel was named after the German name for the steppe wolf. Originally published in Germany in 1927, it was first translated into English in 1929. Steppenwolf (originally Der Steppenwolf) is the tenth novel by German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse.
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