The Myth of the Quest and the Novel: The Vision of Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse was born on July 2, 1877 in Calw, a town in southern Germany. Though born in Germany he was a Swiss citizen because of his father, a Baltic-Russian with Swiss citizenship. He became a naturalized German citizen at the age of twelve. As his father was a Protestant theologian and his mother the daughter of an Indian missionary, he grew up in a widely-varied but deeply religious environment.