Siddhartha is a novel with universal appeal, and is the most well-known text by Nobel prize-winning (1946) German author, Hermann Hesse. It is a story written amid the emergence of psychoanalysis and the conflict of World War I, and in the context of a period of intellectual and moral turbulence and complexity. Many of Hesse's contemporaries found the text simplistic, and criticism of its oversimplification of religious and spiritual subject matter has lasted over the decades despite its worldwide success.
After WWII, the novel was published in English by New Directions, a publishing house associated with the Beatniks, and in the 60's, the text's subject matter of self-discovery found a...
