Recommendations
Books Like Steppenwolf
What to read after Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf (1927) is the great novel of the divided self — Harry Haller, half-man and half-wolf, unable to fit into bourgeois society, who enters the Magic Theatre and discovers that there is not one self but many. If you were drawn to its exploration of inner division and its refusal of the comfortable middle, these novels will find you in the same territory.
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Siddhartha
by Hermann Hesse
Hesse's other major novel — the young Brahmin Siddhartha's search for spiritual truth in ancient India; shorter and more serene than Steppenwolf, it explores the same themes of self-knowledge and transcendence without the urban alienation and self-division; the most widely read companion to Steppenwolf and often the better starting point for new Hesse readers
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Nausea
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Antoine Roquentin's discovery that existence is contingent and inexplicable — the French existentialist parallel to Steppenwolf's German proto-existentialism; where Haller finds his division from society intolerable, Roquentin finds the existence of things intolerable; both novels are about a man whose intelligence makes it impossible to live in the ordinary social world
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The Stranger
by Albert Camus
Meursault, who cannot feel the emotions society expects — the most accessible existentialist novel and the clearest companion to Steppenwolf in its portrait of a man who cannot connect his inner life to the world's demands; where Haller's alienation is operatic and self-conscious, Meursault's is so total that he cannot see it
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Demian
by Hermann Hesse
Emil Sinclair's coming-of-age story and his relationship with the mysterious Max Demian — Hesse's earlier novel that anticipates Steppenwolf in its exploration of self-discovery and the rejection of conventional middle-class values; shorter and more accessible, published in 1919, it is the natural companion to Steppenwolf within Hesse's own work
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The Trial
by Franz Kafka
Josef K. arrested without explanation — Kafka's vision of the social world as an incomprehensible machine for destroying individuals; where Haller sees the world as the comfortable but stifling bourgeois system, Josef K. sees it as an arbitrary legal apparatus; both novels are about a man for whom the social world is a trap, and both refuse to explain why
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Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Underground Man arguing against rationalism from his underground room — the nineteenth-century predecessor to Steppenwolf's divided anti-hero; both characters are men of excessive intelligence who cannot live in the world and cannot stop analyzing their inability to live in it; Dostoevsky's Underground Man is the ancestor of Harry Haller
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
Dorian Gray's portrait ages in place of its subject — Wilde's novel is about the same division between the aesthetic self and the moral self that Steppenwolf explores; where Haller's wolf is the instinctual half of his divided nature, Dorian's portrait carries the moral weight of a life devoted to aesthetic pleasure; both novels ask whether the two halves of the self can coexist
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The Razor's Edge
by W. Somerset Maugham
Larry Darrell, an American who refuses the comfortable life expected of him after World War One and goes to India in search of spiritual truth — Maugham's novel covers exactly the same territory as Steppenwolf and Siddhartha: a man who cannot accept the bourgeois world's answers and goes searching for something else; more accessible than either and very well-plotted
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