He felt many readers latched on to Harry's rebellion and despair, but overlooked his journey back from that point, which starts when he meets the beautiful young Hermine. However, in the 1960s, Hermann Hesse said that Steppenwolf was "more often and more violently misunderstood" than any of his other books. This might explain Harry's painfully accurate descriptions of depression, which have perhaps been matched since only by William Styron's Darkness Visible. After leaving his wife in the mid-1920s, Hesse lived an isolated life in Basel, reaching suicidal depths of despair. In writing Steppenwolf, Hesse drew on his own spiritual crisis. Harry longs to kill himself, yet clings stubbornly to his "evil days of inward emptiness and despair". Two souls war inside him: "the beast", yearning for savagery and isolation, and "the man" seeking culture, society and love. Having lost his job, family and home, he lives in wolfish isolation, brooding by day and haunting taverns by night. Once a public intellectual, he has retreated in disgust from modern European culture. The novel's protagonist, 47-year-old Harry Haller, is living an extremely death-like existence.
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