Steppenwolf

Harry Haller, a lonely, middle-aged intellectual who feels split between a refined bourgeois man and a savage 'wolf of the steppes', takes rooms in a respectable house and contemplates suicide. Then he is handed a strange little 'Treatise on the Steppenwolf' that describes his own soul, and meets Hermine, a young woman who teaches him to dance, introduces him to jazz, pleasure and the saxophonist Pablo, and finally leads him into the Magic Theatre, 'for madmen only', where the many selves within him are revealed.

Hermann Hesse published the novel in 1927, at fifty, out of his own crisis, and it became a cult book again in the 1960s, even giving its name to a rock band. This is Basil Creighton's translation of 1929. Read Siddhartha and Demian.