His first novel-“Peter Camenzind,” the tale of a moody, nature-loving young man who drops out of bourgeois society-was taken up as an inspiration by the Wandervogel, a back-to-nature youth movement that promoted what Hesse himself derided as “campfire Romanticism.” For Peter to inspire a mass of followers, Hesse complained, was a misunderstanding of the whole point of the character: “He does not want to follow the path trodden by many, but to resolutely plow his own furrow. . . . This was particularly so during the international Hesse craze of the nineteen-sixties, when the books became passports to the counterculture and Timothy Leary advised, “Before your LSD session, read ‘Siddhartha’ and ‘Steppenwolf.’ ” But, long before then, adolescents were the core of Hesse’s readership, a fact that sometimes irritated him.

Liking him is a good sign at age fifteen, a bad one by age twenty.įor many readers, Hesse’s novels are among the first serious fiction they encounter-a literary gateway drug. In America today, Hesse is usually regarded by highbrows as a writer for adolescents. The great German modernists who were his contemporaries mostly disdained him: “A little man,” according to the poet Gottfried Benn “He displays the foibles of a greater writer than he actually is,” the novelist Robert Musil said.

Ever since he published his first novel, in 1904, Hesse has been one of those odd writers who manage to be at the same time canonical-in 1946, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature-and almost perpetually unfashionable among critics. “It has to be said, there are no points to be won from liking Hesse nowadays.” This rueful assessment of the novelist Hermann Hesse, quoted in the opening pages of Gunnar Decker’s new biography, “Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow” (Harvard), appeared in an obituary in 1962 but it could just as well have been pronounced yesterday, or a hundred years ago.

Hermann steppenwolf author