Singapore Dream And Other Adventures: travel writings from an Asian journey

Hermann Hesse's voyage to the East Indies, recorded in journal entries and other writings translated into English for the first time, describes the experiences that influenced his greatest works.

In 1911, Hermann Hesse sailed through southeastern Asian waters on a trip that would define much of his later writing. With a peek into the workings of his mind through the pages of his journals, poems, and a short story—none of which have ever before been translated to English—these writings describe the real-life experiences that inspired Hesse to write his most famous works: Siddhartha, The Journey to the East, and others.

HERMANN HESSE (1877-1962) was born in Calw, Germany. He was the son and grandson of Protestant missionaries and was educated in religious schools until the age of thirteen, when he dropped out of school. At age eighteen he moved to Basel, Switzerland, to work as a bookseller and lived in Switzerland for most of his life. During World War I, Hesse worked to supply German prisoners of war with reading materials and expressed his pacifist leanings in anti-war tracts and novels. Hesse's lifelong battles with depression drew him to study Freud during this period and, later, to undergo analysis with Jung. When Hesse's first marriage ended, he moved to Montagnola, Switzerland, where he created his best-known works. Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946.

SHERAB CHODZIN KOHN has been teaching Buddhism and meditation for more than forty years. He the author of A Life of the Buddha; he has edited a number of the books of his teacher, the Tibetan meditation master Chogyam Trungpa; and he has also translated many works including Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, You Are Here by Thich Nhat Hanh, and Stories of God by Rainier Marie Rilke. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.