Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth by Hermann Hesse and Michael Roloff and Michael Lebeck

A young man awakens to selfhood and to a world of possibilities beyond the conventions of his upbringing in Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse’s beloved novel Demian. Emil Sinclair is a quiet boy drawn into a forbidden yet seductive realm of petty crime and defiance. His guide is his precocious, mysterious classmate Max Demian, who provokes in Emil a search for self-discovery and spiritual fulfillment. A brilliant psychological portrait, Demian is given new life in this translation, which together with James Franco’s personal and inspiring foreword will bring a new generation to Hesse’s widely influential coming-of-age novel.

Demian waxes and wanes poetically about the human spirit, but in contrast to Siddhartha, it is surprisingly direct in its focus on individualism and self-reliance.
The story is relatively simple – a bullied, questioning, and morally grey protagonist encounters an aloof individual named Demian, who takes a peculiar interest in him and makes him question Biblical allegories. He gains such an outsized influence in the protagonist's life that even his dreams and art are dictated by him. It is worth mentioning that the novel contains so much Freudian influence that it should list him as a second author.
However, the meat of the story lies in its subtext – its glorification of individualism to insufferability, the “Mark of Cain” through which society's disaffected individuals find each other, and its focus on dreams as a tool for discovering oneself. While it is hard to disagree with the novel's aims and its unsubtle hints for people to start finding spiritual meaning, Demian sometimes becomes too heavy-handed, and it doesn't have nearly as interesting characters, monologues, and plotlines as those in Siddhartha. I'd recommend Demian only because it makes note of the fact that solitude is important in one's life and cannot be found in the company of others, however evident this sounds.