Hermann Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but his real fame came decades later when the American counterculture adopted Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and The Glass Bead Game as sacred texts. The German-Swiss novelist who wrote about spiritual seeking, Eastern philosophy, and the tension between bourgeois conformity and artistic freedom became, posthumously, the most-read author of the 1960s youth rebellion.

This episode traces Hesse from his missionary family childhood through the nervous breakdown and Jungian analysis that transformed his writing, the novels that spoke to a generation he never met, and the irony of a reclusive Swiss bourgeois becoming the patron saint of hippie culture.

• Hesse’s strict missionary family and the adolescent rebellion that nearly destroyed him
• The World War I breakdown, Jungian analysis, and the creative rebirth that followed
• Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and The Glass Bead Game — the novels the counterculture claimed
• The 1960s revival and the irony of a Swiss recluse becoming the hippie generation’s guru