Steppenwolf

Sound Bite

Thomas Wayne presents a contemporary take on Hesse's classic story, so apt today, of the lone individual lost in the ironic good fortune and security of bourgeois banality and cultural conformity. Harry Haller has all the insight, all the leisure, all the material goods he needs, yet he is not at peace with his life. A potent combination of Eastern and Western insights into the human search for meaning is given new life in a fresh translation.

About the Book

Thomas Wayne presents a fresh new translation of this classic that is a particular favorite of young adults confronting life's deepest questions and equally liberating for readers facing a mid-life crisis. Basil Creighton's 1929 version (revised in 1963 by Joseph Mileck) is the best-known version in English; it skips words, smoothes out long, involved passages, unnecessarily 'improves' the text ' all things Thomas Wayne refuses to do. As with his already published translations of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, Ecce Homo, and The Antichrist, he emphasizes a strict adherence and reverence for the literal ' a Hesse for the 21st century, meaningful and faithful to the original.