Like all of his major works, Hermann Hesse's "Demian" has a fascinating and remarkable history of genesis and reception. The author, who was forty years old at the time, wrote this book in the midst of the First World War. Although completed in the autumn of 1917, it wasn't published until June 1919, six months after the end of the war, due to Hesse's relative obscurity as a writer. He presented the manuscript to the publisher as the debut work of a supposedly young, ailing poet named Emil Sinclair, who until then had only achieved fame through pacifist articles and stories in newspapers and magazines—works that Hesse had also written.
Despite this anonymous presentation, the book was enthusiastically received and awarded the prestigious Fontane Prize for best debut work by a first-time author. The influential writer Thomas Mann compared the impact of "Demian" to that of Goethe's "Werther," praising how the book captured the zeitgeist with chilling precision, enabling an entire generation to identify with a voice they considered the embodiment of their deepest feelings about life. Before the pseudonym was revealed in May 1920, "Demian" had already gone through three reprints. Another 93 printings followed during Hesse's lifetime, now under his real name.