About the author
Hermann Hesse was born in 1877 in the town of Calw, on the edge of Germany’s Black Forest. He grew up in a missionary family whose religious beliefs deeply influenced him. Apart from Siddhartha, his best known works include Steppenwolf and The Glass Bead Game (also known as Magister Ludi) which explore an individual's search for spirituality outside society.
In 1946, Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He lived the rest of his life quietly in Switzerland and died in 1962 at the age of eighty-five.
