Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877 – August 9, 1962) was a Swiss poet and novelist best-known for his novels Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and The Glass Bead Game. He was born in the Black Forest region of Germany to a Swabian Pietist family that served as missionaries in India and later ran a publishing firm that specialized in theological texts and schoolbooks. It seems fitting that his work has a persistent theme of the search for spiritual authenticity and self-knowledge.  As a young man he worked in antiquarian bookstores until publication of Gertrude in 1904 enabled him to make a living as a writer. He moved to Bern in 1912 and became a Swiss citizen in 1923. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946. His popularity waned in the 1950’s, but his popularity revived in the 1960’s as the counterculture  found resonance in his work, largely due to the influence of Timothy Leary and Colin Wilson.