Hesse's classic story, a potent combination of Eastern and Western insights into the human search for meaning, raises issues that are perhaps more important in our current cultural climate than ever before. Steppenwolf, first published in German in 1927, is given new life in this fresh translation.
Thomas Wayne presents a contemporary take on the lone individual lost in the ironic good fortune and security of bourgeois banality and cultural conformity. Harry Haller, the hero, has all the insight, all the leisure, all the material goods he needs, yet he is not at peace with his life and decides to commit suicide. Then Hermine and her friends open to him the countless pathways of self-discovery.
Basil Creighton's 1929 translation (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. He emphasizes a strict adherence and reverence for the literal -- a Hesse for the 21st century, meaningful and faithful to the original.