It is in virtually every respect a voice from within which whispers: “Become who you really are!”Įvery generation that confronts great literature is apt to see in it a projection of its own problems, needs, and desires. It is in many respects an invitation to renounce the customary manner of looking at life and to refashion one’s existence after one’s deepest desires. It is in some respects like a newborn child which looks upon the world for the first time with wondering eyes, intoxicated with the delirium of initial discovery. Steppenwolf is a book with few answers and fewer certainties. The degree to which someone can live without certainties or answers need not be a sign of immaturity or indecisiveness, but one of adulthood and inner strength. And a question must be loved before it will surrender its secret. If art could be said to engage in a love affair, it would be a love affair with questions. For to have an answer is to possess certainty, and to possess certainty is to cease growing, and to cease growing is to cease existing. And perhaps the royal road to indifference is the possession of answers, answers cut-and-dried, prefabricated answers that spare someone the necessity of knowing even the questions. ∙ In 1994, Kay celebrated the band’s 25th anniversary with a series of concerts in the former East Germany, near his childhood home, and with his autobiography, Magic Carpet Ride.If a work of art could commit a sin, it would be that of leaving those who encounter it indifferent. ∙ Kay contributed vocals to Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s 1988 hip-hop cover of Steppenwolf’s hit “Magic Carpet Ride.” ∙ The group broke up for the first time on February 14, 1972, which Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty officially declared to be Steppenwolf Day. ∙ All five studio albums they released between 19-including the Gold-selling The Second-reached the Top 20 of the Billboard 200. ∙ Their biggest hit, 1968’s “Born to Be Wild,” became the rebellion theme for a generation after it was featured in Dennis Hopper’s 1969 counterculture film, Easy Rider.

∙ Formed in Los Angeles in 1967 by singer John Kay and other ex-members of Canadian band The Sparrow, the group took their name from the title of a Hermann Hesse novel.

Steppenwolf was a Canadian-American rock band whose thundering sound propelled several enduring anthems of the ’60s and helped pave the way for the rise of ’70s hard rock.

Hermann hesse's steppenwolf