"Pilgrim of Crisis"

"In the 1960s and 1970s, Hermann Hesse found more raders in the United States than any other German writer of this century. His novels Steppenwolf, Demian, and Siddhartha sold in the millions, capturing and shaping the counter-culture's infatuation with the East and mysticism, and youth's absorption in the passion of adolescent crisis. This definitive biography is a fascinating account of an artist's life devoted to an impassioned quest for meaning in a fragmented world - a life even more notable for the crises of our age than the fiction he wrote. Ralph Freedman reveals how Hesse - the first major writer to be psychoanalyzed - embarked on a near-mythic odyssey into the turmoil of his inner life as he sought the contradictions in the role of the modern artist." (blurb)

Prologue: A Perspective

1. Childhood and Its Discontents
2. The First New Life: From Bookseller to Author
3. The Second New Life: The Author and His Household
4. The Idyll Unraveled
5. From Crisis to War
6. The Third New Life: Vagabond of the Imagination
7. The Ailing Traveler
8. Symbolic City: The Self's Inferno
9. The Fourth New Life: From Sense to Spirit
10. Citadel Against History
11. The Final New Life

Epilogue: Pilgrim of Crisis