Amid the same productive year that saw Peter Camenzind, Hesse also published a very different kind of work: a biographical essay titled Boccaccio. Issued in 1904 by Schuster & Loeffler in Leipzig, this short book is Hesse's tribute to the great Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio, famed author of the Decameron. Unlike Hesse's novels and poems, Boccaccio is non-fiction, part of a series of literary portraits that the publisher commissioned. In it, the young Hermann Hesse, himself freshly returned from a formative trip to Italy, paints a lively picture of Boccaccio's life (1313-1375) and times. He discusses Boccaccio's upbringing in Florence, his humanist circle of friends, and the creation of his masterwork The Decameron, a collection of 100 tales. Hesse published this piece anonymously or under commission (it was common then for series volumes not to feature the author's name prominently), so it did not contribute to his fame in the way his fiction did. However, the book had its own quiet publishing history: it likely appeared as a slim, attractive volume aimed at educated readers with an interest in classic authors. It might have been part of a larger series on "Great Men of Letters," which was popular in that era. While Boccaccio did not achieve wide circulation in English (no widely known English edition exists aside from perhaps later scholarly translations), it remains an intriguing example of Hesse working as a literary critic and historian.