Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse
Born	(1877-07-02)2 July 1877 Calw, Kingdom of Württemberg, German Empire
Died	9 August 1962(1962-08-09) (aged 85) Montagnola, Ticino, Switzerland
Resting place	Cimitero di S. Abbondio, Gentilino, Ticino
Occupation	Novelist short story author essayist poet painter
Genre	Fiction
Notable works	The Glass Bead Game (1943) Siddhartha (1922) Steppenwolf (1927) Narcissus and Goldmund (1930) Demian (1919)
Notable awards	Gottfried-Keller-Preis (1936) Goethe Prize (1946) Nobel Prize in Literature (1946) Wilhelm Raabe Literature Prize (1950) Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (1955)
Spouse	Maria Bernoulli ​ ​ (m. 1904⁠–⁠1923)​ Ruth Wenger ​ (m. 1924⁠–⁠1927)​ Ninon Hesse ​ (m. 1931⁠–⁠1962)​
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Hermann Karl Hesse (German: [ˈhɛʁman ˈhɛsə] ^ⓘ; 2 July 1877 – 9 August 1962) was a German-Swiss poet and novelist, and the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His interest in Eastern religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions, combined with his involvement with Jungian analysis, helped to shape his literary work. His best-known novels include Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Narcissus and Goldmund, and The Glass Bead Game, each of which explores an individual's search for authenticity, self-knowledge, and spirituality.

Hesse was born in 1877 in Calw, a town in Germany's Northern Black Forest. His father was a Baltic German and his grandmother had French-Swiss roots.^{[citation needed]} As a child, he shared a passion for poetry and music with his mother, and was well-read and cultured, due in part to the influence of his polyglot grandfather.^{[citation needed]}

As a youth, he studied briefly at a Protestant boarding school, the Evangelical Seminaries of Maulbronn and Blaubeuren, where he struggled with bouts of depression and once attempted suicide, which temporarily landed him in a sanatorium. Hesse completed Gymnasium and passed his examinations in 1893, when his formal education ended. An autodidact, Hesse read theological treatises, Greek mythology, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich Schiller, and Friedrich Nietzsche after his formal education concluded. His first works of poetry and prose were being published in the 1890s and early 1900s with his first novel, Peter Camenzind, appearing in 1904.