Joseph Mileck was born in 1922 in Sanktmartin, a German-speaking village in Romania. He took his doctorate at Harvard and taught in the German Department at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1950, for about four decades.
His scholarship centres on one writer, Hermann Hesse. Hermann Hesse and His Critics (1958) surveyed half a century of Hesse criticism and its bibliography. Late in his career he turned to the community he came from. He wrote a study of the village dialect, Samatimerisch, and a book on the exodus of Romania's Germans, Zum Exodus der Rumäniendeutschen. In 2003 he came back to Hesse with a study of the writer's relation to politics and to the Orient.
He is best known for Hermann Hesse: Biography and Bibliography (1977), two volumes of about 1,400 pages that gather what was known of Hesse's life and everything written by and about him. The University of California Press later described him as the compiler of the huge two-volume Hesse bibliography. A one-volume critical biography, Hermann Hesse: Life and Art, followed. In 1963 he and Horst Frenz also revised Basil Creighton's 1929 English translation of Steppenwolf. They wanted a more exact and more readily understood text, so they Americanized British spellings and idioms and removed phrasing that sounded like German.
Start with Steppenwolf, the one book here. It is Hesse's 1927 novel about Harry Haller, a solitary and disillusioned man, and it is the Creighton text as Mileck and Frenz revised it. If the novel makes you curious about how much of Hesse's own life went into it, try Life and Art next. It is the easier of his two big Hesse books to read straight through.
