90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books

Of course, very few people go through the gate and abandon the beautiful phenomenon of the outside world for the interior reality that they intuit…

A visitor to a zoo discovers he can understand the animals talking, a young man turns into a mountain and a bird guides a boy to another planet in this selection of dream-like and visionary fairy tales from the great German-Swiss master.

HERMANN HESSE was born in Calw, Germany, in 1877. As a child, he lived for a time in Basle. He spent a short period studying at a seminary in Germany but soon left to work as a bookseller in Switzerland. From 1904 he devoted himself to writing. After a first volume of verse (1899), Hesse established his reputation with a series of lyrical romantic novels-Peter Camenzind (1904), Unterm Rad (The Prodigy, 1906), Gertrud (1910) and the short story, Knulp (1915). After a visit to India in 1911 he moved to Switzerland and worked for the Red Cross during the First World War. He was denounced in Germany and settled permanently in Switzerland, where he established himself as one of the greatest literary figures in the German-speaking world. His humanity, his searching philosophy developed further in such novels as Siddhartha (1922), Der Steppenwolf (1927), Narziss and Goldmund (1930) and Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game, 1943), while his poems and critical writings won him a leading place among contemporary thinkers. Hesse won many literary awards, including the Nobel Prize in 1946. He died in 1962, shortly after his eighty-fifth birthday.