Breathtakingly persistent self-reflection and sobering criticism of civilization
Morbid, beautiful, and fantastic: Hesse's most daring novel.

“You have to be proud of your pain.
“All suffering is a reminder of our nobility.”

Hari Haller, a middle-aged man who describes himself as a "wolf in the wilderness," is unable to adapt to a society that is becoming more lighthearted and hedonistic, and is caught between two eras, always thinking about suicide, carrying a mental wound.
Hermine, a woman who is like his alter ego, appears before Haller, who was living in pain.
Through Hermine, Haller meets the musician Pablo and the beautiful prostitute Maria, and together they open their eyes to a new world.
Listening to music, dancing, making love, and experiencing reverie in the magic theater, Haller discovers a new self, his true self.

Hesse's novel, Steppenwolf, published when he was fifty, deals with shocking topics at the time, such as schizophrenia, drugs, homosexuality, group sex, and high-class prostitutes.
In addition, this work, which displays a fierce authorial consciousness and diverse formal experiments, is called the most daring novel among Hesse's works, and Hesse confesses his own experiences through Harry Haller's memoirs.
Decades after its publication, 『The Wolves of the Steppes』 was read as a bible by the 1968 movement generation and hippies who shook the United States and Europe, and received great response.

I don't want to, and I can't, dictate to readers how they should understand my work.
Let each take what is helpful to him.
However, I would be happy if readers would notice that, despite its depiction of the morbid and the perilous, the book does not rush to death or ruin, but rather to healing.
─Hermann Hesse

The gramophone polluted the air of my study, which had been filled with an ascetic spirit, and strange American dance tunes rushed in, disturbing, or rather destroying, my organized musical world.
In this way, a terrifying new force, dismantling everything, surged into my life, which had hitherto been so precisely outlined and so strictly enclosed.
The "Wild Wolf Theory" and Hermine's words that humans have a thousand souls were correct.
In my mind, every day, new souls appeared beside all the old ones, making a fuss and asserting themselves.
So now, as if looking at a picture before my eyes, I clearly saw that my individuality up until now was nothing more than an illusion.
I had lived the life of a man who, by justifying the three or four abilities and disciplines I happened to possess, was an expert with an impeccable knowledge of literature, music, and philosophy. Meanwhile, I had felt the rest of my personality—the chaos of all my other abilities, impulses, and endeavors—as a burden, and had called it a "Wild Wolf."

--- pp.182~183