LITERATURE 36 “The Most Complex Of All Hesse’s Writings” 38HESSE, Hermann. Steppenwolf. London, 1929. Octavo, original red cloth, dust jacket, custom clamshell box. $8500 First edition in English of the Nobel laureate’s “incomparable and explosive book,” a splendid copy. On earning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946, Hesse’s body of work was praised for drawing so richly upon “influences from Buddha and St. Francis to Nietzsche and Dostoevsky… [that] found magnificent expression in the fantastical novel Der Steppenwolf, an inspired account of the split in human nature, the tension between desire and reason… an incomparable and explosive book” (Nobel Prize Presentation Speech). Steppenwolf, in many ways his most autobiographical novel, is “the most complex of all Hesse’s writings and the most psychologically profound” (O’Neill, ed., Great World Writers, 595). On publication in Germany in 1927 it “was eagerly embraced by a body of Hesse’s admirers… [but] by 1933 Hesse was being attacked in the Nazi press for poisoning the minds of youth,” and soon Steppenwolf and all his books were banned in Germany (Johnson, Social Impact, 172). Book with a bit of foxing to text block edge, minor toning to head of spine. Bright, price-clipped dust jacket with toning to spine, shallow chipping to spine head. An attractive copy. “He Found Himself Changed In His Bed To Some Monstrous Kind Of Vermin” 39 KAFKA, Franz. The Metamorphosis. London, 1937. Slim octavo, original half blue cloth, glassine, custom box. $6500 First edition in English of one of Kafka’s most important works. “While critics have interpreted this chilling story variously as a description of despair in a meaningless world, as a reaction to institutional authoritarianism, and as an expression of conflict between the author and his father, its power seems to rest in its resistance to explanation. W.H. Auden has said of it, ‘Had one to name the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka would be the first one would think of” (New York Public Library’s Books of the Century, 13). First published in German in 1915. With partial original glassine. Book fine; fragile very good original glassine almost entirely intact with mild loss to edges and spine.
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