Nobel Prize-winner Hermann Hesse was a German-Swiss poet, novelist and painter who is best-known for his seminal novels Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and The Glass Bead Game. A child of missionaries, Hesse s writings are heavily influenced by Eastern mysticism, spirituality and the search for self-knowledge, themes that resonated with the hippie culture of the 1960s and which contributed to a resurgence in interest for Hesse s work following his death in 1962.