![]() ![]() Many of us are familiar with this desire it animates almost every young person, in one way or another. Hesse’s work was attuned to a youth culture animated by an amorphous desire for a breakthrough in consciousness precisely because such a desire gripped him throughout his entire life. Hesse went on to become the bestselling German author of the 20th century, and sits below only the Brothers Grimm and Karl Marx as the most translated German writer of recent decades. But by 1968, as Der Spiegel observed, the hippies had pulled this fading writer ‘out of the doldrums’. ![]() But the 1960s embrace of Hesse ranks with the weirdest of them all. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) was originally a flop. Franz Kafka died in 1924 believing that his manuscripts would be burnt. But the novels he left behind, Leary declared in The Psychedelic Review, were a ‘priceless manual’ for navigating the acid trip. Hesse had died a year earlier, at the age of 85. In 1963, Timothy Leary, the high priest of LSD, anointed a German author, Hermann Hesse, the ‘poet of the interior journey’. ![]()
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