Seen at the time of its publication in 1972 as an embarrassment by some of his friends and a disappointment by many of the admirers of his earlier romantic and idyllic works, Der Steppenwolf is now generally considered to be Hermann Hesse's most innovative and influential novel, comparable in its modernity, according to Thomas Mann, to James Joyce's Ulysses and Andre Gide's Les Faux Monnayeurs.

What offended early readers, namely the author's willingness to explore and attempt to come to terms with dark side of his self and of a society in transition, is precisely what appealed to rebellious readers in the turbulent sixties and seventies and helped make Steppenwolf the most widely read German novel of the twentieth century. Ironically, this story of a fifty-year-old man, which Hesse thought younger people would not understand, has been and continues to be a favorite of college students.

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After briefly tracing the extraordinary development of Hesse's popular reception, David G.

Richards surveys the critical writing on Steppenwolf, from Hugo Ball's remarks in the first biography of Hesse, which was published the same year as the novel, and the other primarily biographical studies of the prewar period, through the exploration of important facets of the work in mostly German dissertations of the fifties and the explosive expansion of scholarship in the boom years of the sixties and seventies to the more modest achievements and the consolidating studies of the eighties and nineties.