Available Formats
Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclairs Youth
By (Author) Hermann Hesse
Translated by W. J. Strachan
Pushkin Press
Pushkin Press Classics
6th August 2024
29th February 2024
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Religious and spiritual fiction
Paperback
176
Width 129mm, Height 198mm
Emil Sinclair is tormented by a constant battle between light and dark, purity and corruption, ignorance and knowledge. As a restless young man, he struggles to locate a path towards acceptance and serenity. Only under the friendship and guidance of the charismatic, otherworldly Max Demian does he discover an alternative way to think, and to live.Demian transforms a young man's coming-of-age story into a profoundly moving narrative of internal conflict and self-realization.
'Hesse is not a traditional teller of tales but a novelist of ideas and a moralist of a high order...The autobiographical undercurrent gives Demian an Existentialist intensity and a depth of understanding that are rare in contemporary fiction' - Saturday Review
'Beautifully written. It has a seriousness as compelling as that of The Waste Land' - Observer
'Rich and strange' - New York Review of Books
'Hermann Hesse is the poet of the interior journey' - Timothy Leary
Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) was born in Wurttemberg, Germany. He resented his pious and repressive upbringing, and was determined to be "a writer or nothing else". His writing was greatly influenced by his travels to Asia and through his friendship with psychoanalyst Carl Jung. In 1946 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for The Glass Bead Game.