Herzog

By Saul Bellow

1964

Literary Fiction

Moses Herzog — twice-married academic, author of one admired book and one rotting manuscript — has been left by his second wife Madeleine for his one-legged best friend Valentine Gersbach, and responds by writing letters. Letters to his mother, his ex-wives, his psychiatrist, his academic rivals, to Eisenhower, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Spinoza, none of them sent. The novel moves kaleidoscopically between present scene, remembered scene and unsent letter, and its subject is less the divorce than the mind processing it: manic, self-castigating, grandiose, and unreliable about almost everything. It won the National Book Award and made Bellow famous.