Hesse married Maria Bernoulli in 1904, and they settled in Switzerland. He followed this with another novel, Unterm Rad in 1906 ( The Prodigy Beneath the Wheel ), which was a fierce attack on the educational system. The success of the novel ensured that Hesse was able to make a living as a freelance writer.

Hesse's first volume of poetry was published in 1899, and his first novel, Peter Camenzind in 1904. He worked in a clock factory and then as an apprentice in a bookshop in Tübingen, during which time he read widely, especially the work of Goethe and the German Romantic poets. Even at this young age, Hesse had already decided he wanted to be a poet. In 1891, Hesse entered the Protestant Theological Seminary at Maulbronn, but he ran away from the seminary after six months, and his father removed him from the school in May 1892. His father, Johannes, worked for a publishing house and had also, along with his wife Marie Gundert, been a missionary in India. German poet and novelist Hermann Hesse was born on July 2, 1877, in the small town of Calw, in the German state of Württemberg. In writing Steppenwolf, Hesse used the stuff of personal experience to create a dense novel that promotes uninhibited psychological exploration and spiritual aspiration. The protagonist of the novel resembles Hesse in other ways, too, including his temperament and his tastes in music and literature.

Like Haller, whose initials the author shares, Hesse felt depressed and tried to shake it off by sensual indulgence. The novel combines realistic and surrealistic techniques and is strongly autobiographical, since between 19, when he was writing the novel, Hesse went through a crisis similar to that faced by Haller. Through encounters with various people, including two prostitutes and a drug-dispensing saxophone player, he embarks on a search for psychic wholeness and spiritual understanding.

Haller is a self-hating, fifty-year-old intellectual who despises the bourgeois culture in which he lives. The counterculture of that decade took inspiration from the fact that the protagonist of the novel, Harry Haller, makes use of sex and hallucinatory drugs as a means of fulfillment and self-discovery. It is one of the major novels by the renowned German writer and was extremely popular amongst young people in the United States in the 1960s. Hermann Hesse's novel Der Steppenwolf (English translation, Steppenwolf ), was first published in 1927.

Steppenwolf book cover