The Glass Bead Game Novelist is Hermann Hesse, a German-born Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. He was born in 1877 and is best known for his novels Siddhartha and Steppenwolf. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946 for his body of work. His novel The Glass Bead Game, published in 1943, is considered one of his most important works. It tells the story of a utopian society in which intellectuals play a complex game of knowledge and culture.