One of Herman Hesse's earliest novels, In the Old Sun (In der Alten Sonne) was completed in 1908. The book, out of print in English for a hundred years, was originally published before the novels that were to make Hesse famous in the decades after World War II. The poorhouse derelicts of Gerbersau (Hesse's boyhood town of Cawl) appear to have walked out of the fictional world of Gottfried Keller, whose collection of short stories, The People of Seldwyla, was a favorite of Hesse's. The antics of Hürlin, the bankrupt manufacturer, and of Heller, a malicious and lazy former rope maker, are both humorous and poignant. Coyote Canyon Press is proud to bring back into print this "lost novel" by Hermann Hesse.
