Complete and unabridged, with 58 full-page plates by Marianne North, Jan Ciągliński and George Catlin. A brahmin's son leaves home, joins the ascetics, abandons them for a courtesan and a merchant's ledger, and ends up listening to a river. Hesse wrote it after his own collapse and a course of Jungian analysis; it went unnoticed in America for forty years, then sold in millions to the young of the 1960s. It is short, plain, and refuses to hand over its lesson. Fifty-eight plates spanning 1801 to 1925 gather river landscapes, Indian subjects, and foreign ports, a pictorial current running alongside the text.