HERMANN HESSE was a German-born poet, novelist, and painter, born in 1877 in the town of Calw in Württemberg, in the heart of the Black Forest, the German Empire. His best-known novels include "Siddhartha," "Demian," "Steppenwolf," and "The Glass Bead Game," each of which explores an individual's search for self-knowledge and spirituality. Hesse's mother, Marie Gundert, was born in India in 1842, their parents were missionaries and left her in Europe at the age of four when they returned to India. By 1898, Hesse concentrated on the works of the German Romantics, including Novalis, Clemens Brentano, Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff, and Friedrich Hölderlin. In 1896, one of his poems, "Madonna," appeared in a Viennese periodical, and Hesse released his first small volume of poetry, "Romantic Songs." The year after, he published another poem, "Grand Valse," acclaimed by Helene Voigt, the wife of Eugen Diederichs, a publisher. He consequently agreed to publish Hesse's collection of prose entitled "One Hour After Midnight" in 1898. His new bookstore agreed to publish one of his works, "Posthumous Writings and Poems of Hermann Lauscher." Due to the success that Hesse received for "Lauscher," the publisher Samuel Fischer became interested in his writings and, eventually, with the novel "Peter Camenzind," in 1904, arrived a breakthrough: from now on, Hesse had his freedom and could make a living as an author. The book became popular throughout Germany, and Sigmund Freud praised "Peter Camenzind" as "one of his favorite readings." Finally, stable, financially Hesse married Maria Bernoulli. In 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, Hesse registered himself as a volunteer with the Imperial army, but he was unfit for combat duty, and the military assigned him to the service care for prisoners of war. A very profound life crisis befell Hesse with the death of his father in 1916, the severe illness of his son Martin, and contemporary his wife's schizophrenia. Due to this family problem, Hesse was forced to leave his military service and begin receiving psychotherapy, for which he came to know Carl Jung personally. During three weeks in September and October 1917, Hesse penned his novel "Demian," published in 1919, after the armistice, under the pseudonym of Emil Sinclair. By the time Hermann Hesse returned to civilian life in 1919, his marriage with Maria Bernoulli had fallen apart. Due to his wife's psychosis, Hesse saw no possible future with her. They divided their house, their children were accommodated in boarding houses and by relatives, and Hermann Hesse resettled alone in Ticino and eventually got married for the second time. Hermann Hesse observed the rise to power of Nazism in Germany with great concern. In 1933, he helped Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann with their travels into exile and attempted to go against Hitler's suppression of art and literature, along with his third wife, a Jewish. In the 1930s, Hesse made a quiet statement of resistance by reviewing and publicizing the work of banned Jewish authors, including Franz Kafka. After a strong censure from the regime, German journals stopped publishing Hesse's writings, and the Nazis eventually banned them. Fortunately, in 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature and continued to write. He died in 1962.