Description

This is the first English-language edition of *Klingsor’s Last Summer* , which was originally published in 1920, a year after *Demian* and two years before *Siddhartha*. The book has three parts: a story called *A Child’s Heart* , followed by *Klein and Wagner* and *Klingsor’s Last Summer* , Hesse’s two longest and finest novellas. These novellas, along with *Siddhartha* (the three works were republished in 1931 under the title *The Inward Way* ), are the first fruits of the period that began in the spring of 1919, when Hesse settled in the Ticino mountain village of Montagnola to start a new life without his wife and children. *A Child’s Heart* , written in January 1919, in Basel, concerns the transmutation of a boy’s innocence into knowledge of good and evil, and the painful guilt that accompanies this process. Both *Klein and Wagner* (written in May-June 1919, immediately after the arrival in Montagnola) and *Klingsor’s Last Summer* (written shortly after) are set in a southern landscape that reflects Hesse’s life that summer; both novellas have heroes who are more or less Hesse’s age at the time; and in both the hero’s death is preceded by a grand vision of unity in which the polarities of life are resoluved. Hesse exposes himself mercilessly in *Klein and Wagner* , a story of escape, wrenching loose, letting go. But the expressionist painter Klingsor is a more direct self-portrait of the Hesse of 1919.