Steppenwolf / by Herman Hesse

A veteran of the First World War, German author Herman Hesse was one of the interwar years' most venerated figures, assembling a uniquely esoteric body of work as a poet, novelist, philosopher and artist. A westerner with a penchant for eastern wisdom, Hesse's buddhist-centered novel, Siddharta (1923), was well-recieved by nations the world over and continues to be a cross-cultural influence today. Steppenwolf, published in 1927, details the emotional progress of a man unequivocably disturbed by his own intellectual frustrations.

When the young nephew of a woman running a boarding house chances to find a manuscript left by one of the wards, he's uncomfortably exposed to the brutally honest world of a man internally tortured by the paradoxical human condition. The treatise and preceding memoir are all tied in to the figure of the "Steppenwolf", a dual-souled (man-wolf) individual for whom life in the generic context is woefully ill-suited.

The journal depicts narrator Harry Haller as a man both deeply disturbed and deeply perplexed at the world around him. One of a rare, but no less real, breed of men naturally predisposed to forlorn melancholy, Harry is an individual perpetually at war against himself, involuntarily immersed in a constant reality of bottom-dwelling misery. Not only is there no escape from his pit of despair and angst-ridden existence, his burden is increasingly compounded by a perceived ignorance in others towards any similar sentiment or frame of mind. But this is only one side of his dual persona.