Hermann Hesse’s poetical novel, Steppenwolf, was written some twenty years before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. This Faust-like and magical story of the humanization of a middle-aged misanthrope was described in the New York Times as a savage indictment of bourgeois society’ But as the author notes in this edition, Steppenwolf is a book which has been consistently misinterpreted. This self-portrait of a man who felt himself to be half-human and half-wolf can also be seen as a plea for rigorous self-examination and an indictment of intellectual hypocrisy.