"All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?"

A young man awakens to selfhood and to a world of possibilities beyond the conventions of his upbringing in Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse’s beloved coming-of-age novel, Demian. Emil Sinclair is a quiet boy drawn into a forbidden yet seductive realm of petty crime and defiance. His guide is his precocious, mysterious classmate Max Demian, who provokes in Emil a search for self-discovery and spiritual fulfillment.

A brilliant psychological portrait of an individual's departure from social conventions in the search for spiritual fulfillment, Demian encompasses many of the themes associated with Hermann Hesse, its Noble Prize–winning author, particularly the duality of human nature and the quest for inner peace.