Hermann Hesse

German-Swiss · b. 1877

Hermann Hesse — son of missionaries to India, dropout from the seminary that nearly broke him — wrote the seeker's shelf: Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, The Glass Bead Game. A pacifist exile in Switzerland through both world wars and a Jungian analysis patient between them, he won the 1946 Nobel and became, decades later, the improbable patron saint of the sixties counterculture.