Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) was a German-born Swiss novelist and poet. Raised in a religious household, he drew upon his departure from seminary and later psychological crises to explore conflicts between social expectations and individual identity. In “Demian,” his best-known coming-of-age novel, the young Emil Sinclair moves beyond a world divided simply into good and evil and begins to form values of his own. Hesse also incorporated his interest in Eastern philosophy and psychology into his fiction and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946.
