Siddhartha

Siddhartha is the son of a Brahmin in ancient India, raised in comfort and respected by everyone around him. Yet he feels that something essential is missing, and no teaching he has received can fill it. So he walks away from his family, his status and his future in search of a deeper understanding of life.

His path takes him through the company of wandering ascetics who deny the body, then to the Buddhist monks who follow the Buddha's teaching, and eventually into the world of commerce, where he becomes a prosperous merchant. Along the way he meets Kamala, a courtesan who draws him into the pleasures and attachments of ordinary life, and later a humble ferryman who has found an enlightenment that no doctrine could hand him. Love, work, friendship and the experience of being a father each leave their mark on him.

Hesse published the novel in Germany in 1922, and although the setting is far from his own time and place, the book carries the ideas of its era. Eastern religious thought, Jungian archetypes and Western individualism all feed into a single, distinctive view of how a life can be lived. At its heart is one man's conclusion that real wisdom cannot be taught by others and has to be found from within.

Short and lyrical, Siddhartha has stayed in print and in readers' hands for generations, and it was named one of America's best-loved novels in PBS's The Great American Read.