Birthday: July 2, 1877 (Cancer)
Born In: Calw, Germany
Hermann Hesse
(Poet, Novelist & Painter Who Won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature)
Celebrated as one of the finest and most influential writers, Hermann Hesse belonged to the set of writers who were largely disillusioned by proceedings around them during the twentieth century. Most of his writings cited a longing for the bygone era of Romanticism and expressed his spiritual turmoil, deeply rooted in the pathos of the modern age as it was slowly losing its association with the inner self. But despite this, he provided his concept of an ideal world which can be seen as the remnant of the Romantic school of thought. Like Blake and Wordsworth, he concentrated on the three stages of development of human life, which begins with childhood innocence, moving on experience and later comes back to innocence. But this chronology may not be germane in the modern age, especially, the world left devastated and distraught after the two World Wars. He believed people born during or after the great wars are not likely to gain the ‘pre-WWI innocence’ and therefore are “confronted with the necessity to make free choices and judgments” in their second stage of life. Almost all of his novels dealt with this theme. As the world was still recovering from the wreckage of the Wars, his characters searched for the meaning of life which entailed the rejection of the conventional paths to peace.
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