Steppenwolf

Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse’s iconic countercultural novel about the search for authenticity in an inauthentic world, in a new translation

A Penguin Classic

At first glance, Harry Haller seems like a respectable, educated man. In reality, he is the Steppenwolf: wild, strange, alienated from society, and repulsed by the modern age. But as he is drawn into a series of dreamlike and sometimes savage encounters--accompanied by, among others, Mozart, Goethe, and the bewitching Hermione--the misanthropic Haller undergoes a spiritual, even psychedelic, journey, and ultimately discovers a higher truth and the possibility of happiness.

This blistering portrait of a man who feels himself to be half human and half wolf was the bible of the 1960s counterculture, capturing the mood of a disaffected generation. It continues to resonate as a haunting story of estrangement, redemption, and the search for one’s place in the world.

Hermann Hesse (1877­-1962) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946. His many books include Demian, Siddhartha, and Narcissus and Goldmund.

David Horrocks (translator) was a lecturer in German at Keele University. He wrote about and taught German modernism and the work of Hermann Hesse and Günter Grass and translated Hesse and Thomas Bernhard.

Marlon James (foreword) is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Black Leopard, Red Wolf―a finalist for the National Book Award―and Moon Witch, Spider King as well as the Man Booker Prize winner A Brief History of Seven Killings and the novels The Book of Night Women and John Crow’s Devil. A professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, he lives in New York City.