The resulting isolation and inability to make lasting contact with the outside world led to increasing despair and the return of Hesse's suicidal thoughts.

[2] The book is presented as a manuscript written by its protagonist, a middle-aged man named Harry Haller, who leaves it to a chance acquaintance, his landlady's nephew.

As the story begins, Harry is beset by reflections on his being ill-suited for the world of everyday, regular people, specifically for frivolous bourgeois society.

In his aimless wanderings about the city he encounters a person carrying an advertisement for a magic theatre who gives him a small book, Treatise on the Steppenwolf.

Trying to postpone returning home, where he fears all that awaits him is his own suicide, Harry walks aimlessly around town for most of the night, finally stopping to rest at the dance hall where the man had sent him earlier.

They talk at length; Hermine alternately mocks Harry's self-pity and indulges his explanations of his view of life, to his astonished relief.

She teaches him to dance, introduces him to casual drug use, finds him a lover (Maria) and, more importantly, forces him to accept these as legitimate and worthy aspects of a full life.

After attending a lavish masquerade ball, Pablo brings Harry to his metaphorical "magic theatre", where the concerns and notions that plagued his soul disintegrate as he interacts with the ethereal and phantasmal.

Pablo wakes, covers her body with a rug, and exits the room, after which he returns disguised as Mozart to chastise Harry for his attitude in life.

[4] American novelist Jack Kerouac dismissed it in Big Sur (1962), though popular interest revived in the 1960s, specifically in the psychedelic movement, because it was seen as a counterculture book and because of its depiction of free love and explicit drug use.

It is about a wolf named Harry who is kept in a zoo and entertains crowds by destroying images of German cultural icons such as Goethe and Mozart.